


all the wrong turns

by azurewaxwing



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: (or is it a mistaken identity?), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Getting Together, Identity Porn, Identity Reveal, Ill-Advised Nicknames, M/M, Secret Identity, The Fabled Quad Axel, Yurio is so mad about everything that's happening here, but what else is new
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:16:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 48,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28414512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azurewaxwing/pseuds/azurewaxwing
Summary: PoodleYuuuuri did you know you're ranked second on “Top Ten Butts in Men’s Figure Skating” ???The blog had ranked Victorthird, below Yuuri, which is laughable. “This is an opportunity,” Phichit says, when he finds Yuuri in the kitchen, staring at the text while his pot of instant noodles boils over on the stove. “To find out if it’s Victor, I mean.”Katsuki Yuurithe rankings are clearly wrongparticularly the top threeBut either Poodle isn’t Victor, or he isn’t interested in defending the honour of his butt:of course it’s wrong! your butt is clearly superior to that Canadian, his ass is flatter than blinchiki.(After his disastrous Grand Prix Final, Katsuki Yuuri decides to try to be the first skater to land a quad axel in competition. It’s a secret from everyone, except the mysterious text correspondent who appeared in his phone contacts as “Poodle” following the Sochi GPF.)
Relationships: Katsuki Yuuri/Victor Nikiforov
Comments: 388
Kudos: 670





	1. Takeoff

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally going to be a historical AU with Yuuri landing the first ever quad in competition, but it turns out I’m too Canadian to take that away from Kurt Browning, even in a fic. So then my mind hissed _quad axel_ and met up with my absolute certainty that Victor Nikiforov wouldn’t let Katsuki Yuuri get away from that post-GPF banquet without giving him his phone number, and that’s how we ended up at the intersection between (unintentionally) secret identities, really really difficult jumps, and late-night philosophical text conversations.
> 
> In reality, Shoma Uno landed the first ratified quad flip in competition in April 2016, and Yuzuru Hanyu landed the first ratified quad loop in November 2016. As of the date of posting, no-one has landed a quad axel in competition. You can see a video of Yuzuru Hanyu trying it [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMVBCqMfvSc).
> 
> The title is from Ben Folds’ “The Luckiest”: 
> 
> I don’t get many things right the first time  
> In fact, I am told that a lot  
> Now I know all the wrong turns  
> The stumbles and falls brought me here
> 
> Big thanks to phnelt for her help with this one.

> _The axel is the only jump that requires the skater to take off while skating forwards, rather than backwards. This means that a skater attempting the fabled quad axel must turn around and face the impossible head-on …_
> 
> _It Figures Magazine_ , September/October 2015 issue, “The Quad Revolution”

###

**Barcelona, Spain  
Saturday, December 10, 2016  
ISU Grand Prix Final, Men’s Free Skate**

Three-quarters of a second, Yuuri thinks, as he folds his arms into his opening pose. Four and a half rotations. The span of a breath, a blink, a heartbeat. 

When he looks up, Victor is crowded tight against the boards, gaze unwavering. _I’m going to do it, Victor. You’ll watch?_

_I won’t take my eyes off of you._

The music begins. He unfurls, pushes off, and skates towards history.

###

**Detroit, Michigan  
Wednesday, December 16, 2015**

Yuuri comes home from Sochi to find thirty-seven messages waiting on his phone, one for every hour he’s just spent travelling. 

No: better to say he comes in to DTW to find thirty-seven messages waiting on his phone, because Detroit isn’t home. Nowhere is home, really; sometimes Yuuri feels like he lives suspended in flight between competitions, in the geography of the jet-lagged. A country cobbled together from a string of airports. This time it had been AER and Sheremetyevo and JFK and DTW, tied together by bleary sleep in an upright seat and tasteless plane food and a crick in his knees and a throbbing bruise on one hip, a souvenir of his first (and probably only) Grand Prix Final. 

It’s a country for the lost and lonely, Yuuri thinks, as he hunches into himself at the back of the small crowd by the darkened baggage claim. A home for those who don’t have the strength to come down, to stick the landing in any one place. Forever in the air: right now, it sounds like a good thing. He doesn’t want to face what he’s coming back to, doesn’t want to look at how badly he’s flubbed this particular landing. Better to lose himself in the un-country of travellers, where no-one can find him, and no-one will come looking, anyway. 

He flips his phone on while he waits for his suitcase to fall into the embrace of the luggage carousel’s infinite silver sit spin. It’s not that he wants to read his messages, exactly, but he wants something to distract him, to keep him from making accidental eye contact with some fellow passenger who might say _hey, aren’t you that skater who …_. The skater who—well. There are a lot of words for what he did, and none of them nice. 

The first messages he scrolls through are exactly what Yuuri expects: seventeen from Phichit, with exactly the type of gentle encouragement ( _you’ll make the podium next time, Four Continents isn’t too far off, your step sequence was great!!!_ ) that Yuuri can’t stomach right now; he skims through without answering. He’ll see Phichit in the morning, anyhow. Worse are the ones from other skaters who made the Finals: Michele Crispino and Cao Bin have both sent cheerful messages about seeing him at the next banquet, words designed to slice open the wound of Yuuri’s certainty that there will be no more Grand Prix banquets for him. And apparently Christophe Giacometti is a colossal jerk; his message just says _Yuuri! It’s your friend Chris! ;) We’ll have to have a rematch someday soon, hmmm?_

Then there are a few from Mari: 

I hear you called and apologized 8:47 AM  
and I just want you to know you don’t need to apologize to us, ok? 8:48 AM

And then she’s sent some pictures of Vicchan, right before the end. Yuuri can’t stomach that, either, for different reasons. He’s glad to turn to Celestino’s terse notes about the schedule for the next two weeks: with Yuuri’s coach stopping for a week-long layover in Italy on the way back from Sochi to visit family, he and Yuuri won’t meet up again until they arrive in Sapporo. _Focus on fundamentals while I’m away,_ Celestino says. _Drill your basics._

The last message—he blinks; reads it again—is from a contact labelled “Poodle.” The message had come in while Yuuri was still in mid-air, somewhere over the lights of Western Europe, or maybe suspended over the Pacific; somewhere in that imagined country, anyway.

 **Poodle**  
Yuuri! I hope your flight is great 2:54 PM  
send me a text when you land ok??? 2:54 PM

He doesn’t know anyone named Poodle, Yuuri thinks, and then flushes bright red, right in the middle of the airport, because _of course_ he doesn’t know anyone named Poodle. It’s obviously a nickname, a nickname that he—or someone else—had filled in for the contact. The profile picture is a little cartoon poodle. It looks like Vicchan. 

Yuuri turns his phone off again, messages unanswered. He keeps it off during the cab ride back to the small apartment he shares with Phichit, off while he drags his suitcase up the echoing metal stairs and creeps through the darkened apartment to his room, off while he flops down onto the single bed. He’s too weary to bother stripping off his sweatpants or t-shirt, even though they carry the stench of almost forty-eight hours of dried sweat. 

When he closes his eyes, though, sleep doesn’t follow. He opens them and stares out the window at the deep navy of the midnight sky, broken only by the intermittent gold flare of streetlights. Late nights are another unreal country, he thinks. The geography of the sleepless. 

He turns his phone on again. 

The number for “Poodle” begins with 7-812; a quick search reveals that Yuuri’s mysterious correspondent lives in St. Petersburg. He knows that St. Petersburg is eight hours ahead of Detroit without having to look it up: years of watching Victor Nikiforov’s every move have familiarized him with the Russian skater’s schedule, where he is in time compared with Yuuri. (The Final hadn’t been the first time they’d been in the same place, at the same time—there had been Worlds, and the Olympics in 2014—but they had never skated in the same flight before, as if they were on the same playing field. That—no. He doesn’t want to think about that, about the fact that it will likely never happen again, about their one miserable interaction.) 

The phone buzzes three times in quick succession, startling a squeak out of Yuuri.

 **Poodle**  
good morning Yuuri!!! 12:47 AM  
oh I guess it’s actually night for you? 12:47 AM  
I hope you got home safe and won’t be out wandering around until dawn again! 😉 12:47 AM

Somehow, this is the first time it has occurred to Yuuri that the hole in his memory that follows his arrival at the Grand Prix banquet might _contain something_ , and that that something might be awful. He hadn’t thought there were more ways to humiliate himself after what happened on the ice, but maybe that’s just a failure of imagination. At the very least, he’s managed to give someone a questionable nickname in his phone contacts, and then entirely forget doing so. 

There’s nothing for it, he decides.

 **Katsuki Yuuri**  
who is this? 12:49 AM

The reply comes back promptly:

 **Poodle**  
don’t play coy with me, Yuuri 12:49 AM  
I know you didn’t forget me! 🤣🤣🤣 12:49 AM  
it’s your Vicchan! 12:49 AM

 _It’s your Vicchan._

Yuuri swallows, unsure whether the raw, scraping sensation in his throat is anger or grief. If it’s anger, it’s at himself, at the self that takes over when he drinks too much and says senseless things and makes horrible decisions, like giving someone the same nickname as his childhood pet, the one who had _just died_. The one whose death had fallen over Yuuri’s free skate like a net, holding him down from the heights he’d dreamed of reaching. (He’s apologizing to Vicchan in his head even as he thinks it: his tumbles and falls are on _his_ shoulders, no-one else’s. But there’d been a moment, too, when Mari called on the Friday night, where he’d thought, sharp and horrible: _Couldn’t you have waited to tell me? Why tell me now, just when it will cause the most pain?_ He can’t unknow that about himself, that he’d wanted to put himself and his skating above the ones he loves, again.) 

So maybe he is angry at himself. Maybe the deep ache in his chest is anger, expanding into a slow supernova of rage. _It’s your Vicchan._ That’s just _mean_. He’s gone and gotten himself drunk and set a steel trap to close over his own heart three days later. 

This time, when he swallows, it’s against tears. Tears he doesn’t really deserve, not after leaving Vicchan for five years, and then—what? Failing miserably on the world stage. Embarrassing himself in front of Vicchan’s namesake. 

His namesake, Victor Nikiforov, who was _at_ that banquet—

Yuuri’s mind stumbles and loses the edge of that thought, because he cannot picture the man who asked him if he wanted a _commemorative photo_ saying “don’t play coy with me, Yuuri,” no matter how hard he tries. Victor Nikiforov, living legend, does not know who Katsuki Yuuri is, and certainly would not refer to himself as _your Vicchan_. There were at least twelve other Russian skaters at the banquet, and most them train in St. Petersburg. Yuuri rolls over in bed and tries, muddled, to list off who had been at the banquet, at least during the little bit of it he can remember before the champagne caught him in its grip: Mila Babicheva, and a girl in the junior women whose name he can’t remember; Georgi Popovich, tagging along to support his rinkmates; the ice dance and pairs couples … and Yuri Plisetsky, the Russian punk, who had yelled at Yuuri in the bathroom, called him a loser. Yuuri ranks him above Victor on the list of plausible candidates, but only barely. 

Andrei Fedorov or Svetlana Fedorova, maybe? The ice dance sibling duo are well-known for being extraordinarily friendly, for taking new and up-and-coming skaters under their wings. And of course it doesn’t even have to be a skater—there were sponsors and ISU people at the banquet, and if Yuuri had wandered outside afterwards he might have run into skating fans, visiting from St. Petersburg. 

He rolls onto his good hip and burrows further under the blankets, scrolling through his phone for any other clues to the identity of “Poodle,” or any indication of what he was doing during the long gap in his memory between drinking the first glass of champagne and waking up in his hotel room the next morning. He’d been dressed in an undershirt and boxers when he woke up, he remembers; nothing unusual there. There are no photos in his camera roll, which in’t too surprising, since Yuuri has long since perfected his “no, no photos, I don’t like photos” spiel, and when he’s drunk he usually manages to keep an iron grip on his phone. 

There are a number of texts to Phichit from the night of the banquet, but they’re in a language that Phichit laughingly calls _drunk Yuuri_ : “It’s the hardest language in the world to learn because there’s no grammar and no consistent spelling.” Truly, Yuuri thinks, it’s a dead language—there’s only one native speaker, and he only appears when Yuuri has far too much to drink. There’s no translating these messages: _Vicchan and then we went_ 😢 starts it off, which might be about his dog or might not, and then _this little kitten! no katsudon, only pirozhki_. The last one just says _tell me poodle when home!_

When he flips to his contact list, though, there are _two_ new contacts: Poodle, and Tiger. The second contact is a St. Petersburg number, too. Yuuri smiles at the phone, pleased: another new contact is an opportunity to play it cool (to the extent that Yuuri is capable of what Americans call “playing it cool,” which is to say _not at all_ ) and hopefully get some extra information. After a moment of thought, he decides to start with something simple.

 **Katsuki Yuuri**  
hey! 12:54 PM  
how are you? 12:54 PM

He doesn’t have to wait long for a response.

 **Tiger**  
fuck off, katsudon 12:55 PM  
don’t think this is a *thing* now 12:55 PM  
because it isn’t 12:56 PM  
we’re not friends now or whatever it is you’re thinking 12:56 PM

Yuuri jerks his hand back, as if the texts are a pack of enraged felines attempting to chew off his fingers. _This_ sounds more like Yuri Plisetsky, but how would the Russian junior know about katsudon? _Wandering around until dawn_ , Poodle had said. Maybe he’d gone out to eat with someone?

 **Poodle**  
anyway you should get some sleep Yuuri 😴  12:57 AM  
I’ll text you in the morning!!! 12:57 AM

In the dark of the small room, the messages glow with a sickly, guilty light. This is exactly the sort of thing that would happen to him, that he would make a friend while drunk and then forget them and have it turn into something awkward and awful. He considers asking again about Poodle’s identity, but then shakes his head. It’s just … too embarrassing for words, to have totally forgotten. Yuuri doesn’t know what he’s said—or, worse, _done_ —with this person. 

He sighs and flicks the phone off, the after-image of the screen stinging white against his eyes in the dark. It doesn’t matter, really. He doesn’t need to worry about who “Poodle” is, because it won’t take Poodle long to realize Yuuri is nothing special, that he’s not worth the effort of making conversation across an eight-hour gulf. It won’t take him long to realize that Yuuri is ordinary, and anxious, and awkward, and introverted and boring and mentally weak and … Well. Nothing to get excited about, no matter what happened at the banquet.

The screen flicks back to life, blazing out in the dark like a spotlight on an exhibition rink.

 **Poodle**  
I know I said you should go to sleep but I just wanted to say goodnight 1:03 AM  
goodnight, Yuuri! ♥️♥️♥️ 1:03 AM

Yuuri stares at this for a moment. Blinks, and looks away from the heart emojis. There’s nothing to worry about, he repeats to himself. Give it a few days, and there’ll be no more messages.

 **Katsuki Yuuri**  
good night 1:04 AM

###

**Detroit, Michigan  
Thursday, December 17, 2015**

Yuuri wakes up to the sound of his phone buzzing. _That’s weird_ , he thinks, as he fumbles his glasses off of the bedside table. He doesn’t get a lot of texts, not really, not compared to Phichit, whose phone is forever chirping with notifications. When he pulls the phone out from under the pillow, a message from Poodle is waiting: _Yuuuuuri how are you not up yet? it’s almost 10 there!_

He’s never been much of a morning person. Normally, it doesn’t bother him—he’s studied sleep requirements for athletes in his kinesiology classes, he knows he should get more sleep than he does, not less—but today, the comment stings. In the grey morning light, Yuuri can feel Victor Nikiforov staring down at him, all thirty-three of his eyes (seventeen posters, but he’s in profile in one) filled with judgment. _Lazy_ , they seem to say. _No wonder your free skate was such a disaster._ Yuuri curls in on himself, tucking into the blanket as if it can protect him from the things that drag him down. 

_Too bad all of those things are already inside the blanket,_ Sochi Olympics Short Program Victor Nikiforov says, from his place above the headboard. _You can’t hide from yourself._

He texts back from under the blanket.

 **Katsuki Yuuri**  
ever heard of jet lag? 9:59 AM  
and I didn’t get in until after midnight last night 9:59 AM

He feels bad as soon as he says it—Victor Nikiforov isn’t _actually_ in his room lecturing him about sleeping in, like some sort of two-dimensional coach Yuuri’s cobbled together from publicity photos; there’s no need to be so defensive—but the reply seems cheerful enough.

 **Poodle**  
you definitely got the worst of the jet lag this time Yuuri!!! 10:00 AM

Yuuri texts back: _yeah, you didn’t even change time zones!_ He’s proud of this for a moment—clever Yuuri, playing like he knows who Poodle is, when all he knows for sure is that St. Petersburg and Sochi are in the same time zone—before he realizes that this is worse than snapping at his mysterious correspondent. He shouldn’t be leading Poodle along, like they’re actually friends. He should be carefully, politely withdrawing from the conversation. He turns the phone off, so that he’s not tempted to reply to whatever Poodle says next. 

“Yuuri?” Phichit’s voice is muffled by the door. “You in there?”

“Yeah.” He doesn’t want to see Phichit yet. If he doesn’t have to look Phichit in the eye, he doesn’t have to imagine the expression on Phichit’s face while he watched the livestream of the Final. 

“You want some breakfast before we head to the rink? I made khao kai jeow.” 

“Oh, yeah, that—that sounds good.” Phichit is a surprisingly good cook. “I’ll be out in a minute, okay?” 

Yuuri hastily shucks off his rank travel outfit, trades it for a clean tracksuit—he still stinks, but Phichit’s used to it—and drags himself into the kitchen. 

Phichit, dressed in his usual technical turtleneck and track pants, is already eating. There’s an omelet on rice waiting in front of Yuuri’s seat. When he slides into his chair and takes a bite, the egg is mixed with minced pork and green onions, just the way he likes it. “Mm,” he says, between mouthfuls. “This is great.”

“Thanks.” 

The tiny kitchen is warm, more from Phichit’s habit of cranking up the electric heaters than the weak sun struggling through the window. There’s a pot of tea on the table, steam making lazy arabesques in the sun. This could be any morning from the last four months, Yuuri thinks, the two of them eating a companionable breakfast before heading over to the rink. He can pretend that Sochi never happened, that—

“When’d you get in?”

“Late last night,” Yuuri says, abandoning the revisionist history. Phichit doesn’t usually wait for Yuuri in the mornings, or make him breakfast; he just heads to the rink when he’s ready. The tea was made special, too—Phichit drinks coffee. All of this is because of what happened in Sochi, not in spite of it. “I didn’t wake you up when I came in, did I?”

“Nope! You know I can sleep through anything.” Phichit hesitates, and puts his next bite back down on the plate. “Are you alright?” 

“Fine. Just a few ugly bruises, and they’ll be gone by next week.” The one on his left hip twinges, and Yuuri rubs a surreptitious hand over it. The triple flip and the quad toe loop had both imploded on that side, forty-five seconds apart. He’d inspected the bruise while changing, not surprised to find it was already the colour of a rotten eggplant. 

“That’s not …” Phichit shakes his head, lets it go. He knows better than to push it, by now; he’s long since figured out how to navigate Yuuri’s moods, what works and what doesn’t. As a roommate, and a rinkmate, he’s much better than Yuuri deserves. “Did you get to chat with Victor, at least?”

Yuuri stiffens, then forces all his muscles to relax. He finishes chewing and pours a cup of tea before answering. “No. No, he … No. There wasn’t time.” He doesn’t want to share the humiliation of the photo situation with Phichit, in part because he thinks Phichit wouldn’t have found it humiliating. Phichit would happily have taken a photo with Victor, posted it on insta and Twitter, and grinned while his notifications racked up. He won’t understand the problem, not really, because Phichit has the best years of his career ahead of him, has already exceeded all the expectations for a skater coming out of Thailand. He has time to show that he deserves to skate on the same ice as Victor Nikiforov. Yuuri, on the other hand—well, he got the opportunity, and wasted it. 

“Too bad. Next time, right?”

“Phichit …” Yuuri trails off. 

“Next year, we’ll be there together,” Phichit says, not looking up from his own plate, “and I’ll tell Victor to talk to you, okay?”

Yuuri pushes back from the table, leaving the eggs half-eaten. “I need to have a shower. I’ll see you at the rink.”

###

> The first quad—a toe loop—was ratified in 1988. It was another ten years before another was officially added to the repertoire, with the salchow in 1998. Then followed another long period with no additional quads, before Brandon Mroz landed the first successful quad lutz in international competition at the NHK Trophy in 2011. In 2014, Victor Nikiforov made history at the Sochi Winter Olympics by landing the first ratified quad flip during his world-record breaking free skate, and this year, at Worlds, Seung-gil Lee of Korea surprised the audience in Shanghai with the first ratified quad loop. That leaves just one quad that no-one has landed in competition …
> 
> _It Figures Magazine_ , September/October 2015 issue, “The Quad Revolution”

###

When he arrives at the rink, Yuuri takes a deep breath in, lets it back out. There’s a familiar scent that lingers in every ice rink he’s ever been in, from Ice Castle Hasetsu to the Iceberg Skating Palace in Sochi. He and Phichit have talked about it a few times, trying to identify the source of the distinctive damp, chemical tang. It’s something like the smell before rain comes, but more artificial, human. Phichit, who’s studying chemistry, thinks it comes from the wet rubber matting that surrounds the rinks. A prosaic source for a scent that runs through his entire life, as steady a presence as the steam of the onsen or his mother’s katsudon. Today it smells moldy, off, abrasive. 

Phichit is already on the ice, working through his short program. Yuuri nods a greeting, then keeps to himself, following Celestino’s instructions to stick to basics. He drills figures and runs through his step sequences, then moves on to some triples. Everything feels awkward, ungainly. He puts a hand down on a triple toe loop, turns a series of triple lutzes into doubles. At one point, he almost runs his face into the boards when he loses focus on a triple salchow.

“I’m going out for dinner with some friends tonight,” Phichit says, when he sees Yuuri pulling on his skate guards, an hour before the scheduled end of their rink time. “You should come. I owe you a night out, right? I told you I’d take you out if you made the Final.”

“Too tired,” Yuuri mutters. “I’m going to bed early.”

Phichit scrunches up his nose, then shrugs. “Okay, well, you know where to reach me if you change your mind.” 

The winter sky on the way home is the same cold hard white as the ice. Yuuri has to look down at the sidewalk to stop the sudden feeling of vertigo, of falling. 

Dinner is an oven-bake pizza he finds at the bottom of the freezer, some brand that tastes vaguely like sand and frost-burnt spinach. He reads an issue of _It Figures_ Phichit left out by the couch, and then, because there doesn’t seem to be anything else left to do with the evening, gets into bed. The Victor posters on the wall stare down at him, and Yuuri finds his hand making its habitual journey down to palm his cock through his pyjama pants. Making eye contact with 2014 Worlds Free Skate Victor—he’s looking back over one shoulder, right arm framing his face, eyes half-closed and mouth half-open—is, as usual, enough to get him half-hard. Victor’s costume that year had an open back, the mesh and interwoven ribbons doing nothing to obscure the long expanse of muscle along his spine. Yuuri lets his eyes drag down and back up, then slides the hand into his pants and begins a slow, steady stroke. It’s just on the edge of too dry, too much friction. He thumbs the head roughly on the upstroke, fully hard now, and closes his eyes. 

_Sloppy,_ says Grand Prix Final 2013 Exhibition Skate Victor, from the other wall. _Your technique is terrible._

Yuuri’s hand freezes, tightening almost painfully.

 _What are you doing with your free hand?_ That’s Layback Spin Victor, from Vancouver 2010. _And your grip …_ He trails off, disdainfully, and Yuuri releases his flagging erection. 

_This isn’t your first time doing this, is it?_ Casual Rinkside Victor, in his black t-shirt and grey pants, has the exact same tone, chipper and dismissive, as the real Victor did when he asked if Yuuri wanted a photo with him. _Well, I guess we can’t all be world-class …_

Yuuri pulls his hand back out of his pants and rolls over on to his stomach. “Shut up,” he says, and then, louder, “shut up!” It’s probably more embarrassing to yell at wall posters than it is to imagine Victor Nikiforov critiquing his masturbation skills, but he doesn’t think he can stand it if Stammi Vicino Promotional Poster Victor says something rude about him. 

Yuuri jams his head under the pillow, closes his eyes, and reaches desperately for the cold embrace of sleep.

###

**Detroit, Michigan  
Friday, December 18, 2015**

In the morning, the posters and his phone are both silent. No-one lectures or teases him for crawling out of bed at 9:45, for lingering too long over breakfast—Phichit hasn’t bothered to wait, this time—or for taking the long route to the rink, delaying the moment when he’ll have to get back on the ice. 

It’s only when he goes to put in his earbuds to cue up the music for his short program that Yuuri realizes why his phone has been so quiet: he’d forgotten to turn it back on yesterday. When he powers it up, a flurry of messages from Poodle are waiting, following on Yuuri’s last text.

Thursday, December 17, 2015  
**Yuuri Katsuki**  
yeah, you didn’t even change time zones! 10:00 AM

 **Poodle**  
🤣🤣🤣 10:02 AM  
and I think your hangover must have been worse too! 😂 10:02 AM  
you shouldn’t be embarrassed though Yuuri, after my first banquet I puked on my exhibition costume 10:02 AM  
the stain never came out 10:03 AM

Yuuri rests his forearms against the boards and scrolls down. There’s a short pause, as if Poodle was waiting for a response, and then: 

**Poodle**  
I know what you’re thinking, Yuuri 10:06 AM  
“but he handles his liquor so well!” 10:06 AM  
and that is true NOW 10:07 AM

Oh, Yuuri thinks. So Poodle is a man. That’s—that’s … well, he has some feelings about that. And now he knows for certain that Poodle is—or maybe was?—an elite skater. The next message, time-stamped fifteen minutes later, resolves that uncertainty, too: _when we’re in Tokyo ask me for my other banquet story ok Yuuri? it’s way too embarrassing for text!_

There are only four men Yuuri can think of who live in St. Petersburg, would expect to compete at Worlds this year, and who have skated at least once before in a Grand Prix Final. Andrei Fedorov still fits, and both Pavel Karev and Konstantin Bakarov and their partners have competed in pairs at past Finals. And then, of course, there’s Victor. Yuuri doesn’t know which seems more improbable: that Victor would puke on his own exhibition costume, or that he would text Yuuri about it. He can more easily imagine Victor actually showing up in his bedroom to say _Your technique is bad_.

He shakes his head and scrolls through to the next text, sent a few hours later. A message icon indicates a photo, followed by the terse notation that it is “Currently unable to download. Please try again later.” There’s no point in trying again later—Yuuri’s phone and data plan are both abysmal, and he’s never managed to figure out how to get photos to show up via text message. He’s left to guess what it might be from the accompanying text: _slipped and almost fell right off the bridge here!!! ice no good without skates ⛸_

On the rink, the rhythmic scratch of Phichit’s blades pauses, and then he glides to a stop on the other side of the boards. “What are you looking at?” he asks, leaning over to see Yuuri’s phone. Yuuri pulls it away, flicking the screen off. “You never just stand around looking at your phone.”

“Nothing,” Yuuri says. “Just reviewing Celestino’s instructions.” 

“That wasn’t a text from Ciao Ciao. He wouldn’t try to send you a picture.” Celestino has adapted to technology because coaching requires it, but his texts are sparse, monosyllabic. 

“Oh, that? That was just someone trying to send me a snow pic,” Yuuri says. “Do you think we’ll get snow before Christmas?” 

Phichit grins, successfully distracted. Phichit loves snow. “If we don’t I’m going to be so mad. What’s the point of coming to Michigan if we can’t have snow at Christmas?”

“Right?” Yuuri says, nodding, although in his opinion snow just makes getting around more difficult. 

“Anyway, I came over to ask if you could film my quad toe.”

“Yeah, I … sure. Give me five minutes?”

He slumps down into the lower row of the stands and continues his review. There’s a burst of texts around 10:30 p.m. St. Petersburg time: inconsequential things, Poodle complaining about traffic and asking whether Yuuri lives close enough to the rink in Detroit to walk there. _My apartment is very nice but there is a long way to go every day_ , he says. Then there’s a gap—sleep, Yuuri thinks, Poodle was asleep—before the chain begins again, just before midnight in Detroit:

 **Poodle**  
Yuuri? 11:23 PM  
Yuuri you haven’t answered all day 11:24 PM  
I hope you’re okay 11:24 PM  
and not just ignoring me 11:24 PM  
don’t ignore me Yuuri!!! 11:25 PM

And then, finally, one lone text from this morning: _Yuuri if you don’t want to talk to me you can just say so_.

On the ice, Phichit lands a jump with a muffled thump, touches down with one hand, and keeps skating. Yuuri hesitates, thumbs hovering over the keyboard. If he leaves it here, if he doesn’t answer, it’ll be over—

Why not, Yuuri thinks. Why can’t he have this? Maybe it’s selfish, to want this, to want to keep this stranger who persists in the face of his silence. But he does want it, wants this one nice thing to balance against the feeling that the doors of the rink—the closest thing to a home he has left—could soon be barred against him. 

_No! Sorry_ , he texts, before he can think better of it. _It’s not that I don’t want to talk, I’m just stressed about Nationals. I’m afraid I’ll bomb like I did at the Final and then what? if I fuck it up I won’t have the funding to keep going in Detroit and then I don’t know if I could realistically keep skating. But I don’t think I want to retire._

As soon as he types it, he realizes it’s true. Something about the anonymity of the exchange makes it feel possible to admit things he could never say to Phichit or Celestino or even just out loud to himself. Probably he’ll never see Poodle again, maybe never even learn who he is, and so it doesn’t matter if he pours his heart out to a stranger. 

The answer is almost instant, like Poodle is a half-step away, fingertips brushing Yuuri’s, even though they’re eight hours and seven thousand kilometres apart: _do you want some tips? on your programs I mean_.

When he stands to go onto the ice, the bruise on his hip throbs, but the one buried deep in his chest seems to ease.

 **Katsuki Yuuri**  
yes 10:45 AM  
yes, I’d like that a lot 10:45 AM  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s not clear exactly when _Yuri on Ice_ is meant to take place—you could make arguments for any year between 2013 and 2017, based on various pieces of evidence in the show—but having considered all the evidence in detail I’ve decided it starts in December 2015 (the Sochi Grand Prix Final) and then moves into 2016 (finishing in December 2016, with the Barcelona Grand Prix Final). I have a lot of thoughts about this and I’ll spare you by not unloading them here in the author's note. [Edited to say that the trailer for _Ice Adolescence_ makes clear that the show does take place in 2016.]


	2. First Rotation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for some sad thoughts about a dead pet (just a bit more than in the first chapter) and Yuuri's anxiety flaring up and having some physical side-effects.

**Barcelona, Spain  
Saturday, December 10, 2016  
ISU Grand Prix Final, Men’s Free Skate**

The crowd seems quiet in the first moments of his program, like they know they’re waiting for something. That, or maybe he’s found some quiet place deep within, where the only things he can hear are the steady rhythm of his heart and the echoes of his conversation with Victor, running in counterpoint to his music. _Yuuri … you know I’ll believe in you, even if you don’t do it? You don’t have to do this for me, okay?_

 _I know_ , he’d said. _I know. But for once I think it might be time to believe in myself._

###

**Detroit, Michigan  
Friday, December 18, 2015 - Wednesday, December 23, 2015**

Receiving messages from Poodle quickly becomes part of the everyday geography of Yuuri’s life, as familiar as the river’s curve in Hasetsu or the cream storefronts and white oaks that line the route to the rink in Detroit. There are messages waiting when he wakes up, when he gets to the rink, when he gets home after practice. He doesn’t quite understand why, but it seems like Poodle _wants_ to talk to him. Even when Yuuri is abrupt or awkward or accidentally rude, Poodle just keeps going, an endless font of exclamation marks and emojis. 

They talk about everything and nothing: the weather in St. Petersburg (snowy) versus the weather in Detroit (not, to Phichit’s disappointment, which leads to Yuuri explaining who Phichit is); what Hasetsu is like in winter; where they would each go for a winter vacation if the season wasn’t spilling over with skating obligations. Yuuri, thinking of the onsen, says he would like to go to Reykjaavik and soak in the Blue Lagoon, while Poodle argues that the entire point of vacationing in winter is to go someplace that’s forgotten what it means to be cold. _Australia!_ he suggests. _Or Thailand, sand and sun and space to swim._

 _Phichit keeps trying to convince me to come and visit Thailand in the off-season_ , Yuuri replies. _Maybe someday._

_Great! You can bring me too!!! 🏝_

The conversation is just … _nice_ , Yuuri thinks; he can’t think of another word that really suits it. And it’s a welcome distraction, waiting to see what Poodle will say, trying to come up with witty replies. Sometimes two entire hours pass without Yuuri thinking about fucking up at Nationals or his miserable flop of a quad salchow or picturing his family being forced to watch a horror movie of Yuuri’s most disastrous performances, played on loop. The posters on his wall are quieter now, too, and when he does imagine Victor talking, sometimes Poodle’s words come out: _your stamina is so high, Yuuri! You should do something with that, up the difficulty at the end of your program._

And then there’s the skating tips. Poodle’s advice is blunt— _your entry to your triple flip is terrible, Yuuri, that’s why you can’t land it consistently_ —but it’s also constructive, filled with helpful suggestions about arm positioning and speed and the transitions between elements.

“Did you change something?” Phichit asks, after watching Yuuri run through his short program on Sunday morning. “It looks different.”

“Bad different?” Yuuri chokes out, still catching his breath. The run through had been mostly clean, although he’d two-footed the landing on the last combination. The short program has never been his weakness, though. He’s been neglecting his free skate, not wanting to tread on tender ground. 

“No! No, it’s a good different.” Phichit tilts his head to one side, thoughtful, while Yuuri begins stretching out his hips. The skaters for the next session are filing onto the ice, laughter bouncing off the rafters. “It’s like … you’ve cleaned things up, somehow. In the bits that were a little muddy.” 

“Oh, yeah, I thought … I just thought it had gotten a little sloppy,” Yuuri mutters, covering a tell-tale red flush with a hamstring stretch, face against shin. 

His attempts to keep Poodle a secret don’t last very long, though. Phichit knows him too well to miss the shift in his texting habits. On Sunday night he catches Yuuri smiling goofily down at a message— _your musicality is your secret weapon, Yuuri … it’s like the song is already inside you and you’re using your body to release it_ —and prods him in the shoulder with one finger. (They’re watching _Into the Woods_ , because Phichit can’t resist a movie musical.) “What’s up? You only smile like that when you’re trying to hide something.” 

“Nothing! Nothing,” Yuuri squeaks, trying to bury the phone between his thigh and the cushion. “What would I need to hide?”

“Whoever it is you’ve been texting with non-stop for the last couple days, maybe?” Phichit says, pausing the film. He takes the hamsters down from their perch on his shoulders and places them on the ground, a sign that he’s serious. “Come on, Yuuri. You know I’m going to figure it out, so you might as well tell me.” 

“It’s embarrassing,” Yuuri mutters. And, yes, the absurdity of the situation leaves him reluctant to share, but it’s not just that. There’s a strange intimacy to his interactions with Poodle, like they’re whispering together in some private space. He’s loath to give that up.

“What, that you made a friend?”

“No.” He shakes his head, makes a decision. Phichit’s right; if he really wants to know, he’ll worm it out of Yuuri somehow. “That I—that I don’t know who it is.” 

“Oh my god. What?” Phichit launches from the couch like a pairs skater in a throw jump and lands on his knees in front of Yuuri. “You—okay, no, start at the beginning, tell me everything.” 

Phichit thinks the entire story is hilarious. He rolls around in glee on the floor for a while, only stopping when he almost squishes one of the hamsters. “This is exactly the sort of thing that would only ever happen to you, Yuuri,” he says, sitting up and corralling the ball of fluff. “Why didn’t you just say _I was so drunk, sorry, remind me how we know each other_?”

Yuuri gives a glum shrug. “I did, sort of? And he didn’t answer! Then I didn’t think we’d keep talking for very long, I guess. And now it’s probably too late. We’ve been talking for days and he’s giving me skating tips and …” he sighs. “I’m afraid if I tell him, he’ll stop talking to me.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Phichit says, with confidence. “Now that I’m involved, we’ll figure it out in no time.” 

Phichit’s assistance mainly seems to consist of suggesting various questions for Poodle, most of which Yuuri refuses to ask, on the grounds that Yuuri would obviously know the answers if his correspondent is Victor. 

“I can’t ask _what’s your middle name_ or _where did you grow up_ ,” he says, as they pause in the middle of the rink. It’s a good thing Celestino isn’t there; the afternoon’s practice, with just the two of them on the ice, has featured very little skating and much more huddling over Yuuri’s phone, trading thoughts. “Those would be almost as bad as _do you have any pets_.” These are things that even a passing fan of Victor Nikiforov would already know. Yuuri knows less about the other candidates, but a lot of the information is out there, for anyone willing to run interviews through Google Translate. 

“Fine,” Phichit says. “I’ll think of something else. Something that you don’t know about Victor.” 

Yuuri shrugs and skates a lazy loop around Phichit. “There’s not very much I don’t know about him.” 

“You should have taken the picture,” Phichit says, with a long-suffering sigh. (Yuuri had been forced to describe the photo offer, in order to explain to Phichit why he thinks Victor is at the bottom of the candidate list. Phichit had reacted exactly the way Yuuri expected.) “Maybe he wanted a photo with _you_ , you know?”

Yuuri wobbles onto the wrong edge and comes to a stop. “That wasn’t it.” 

Phichit shrugs. “Anyway, I’ve been thinking—it’s definitely not Andrei Fedorov, right?” 

“Why not?”

“The jump advice.” 

“Oh,” Yuuri says. He hadn’t thought of that. An ice dancer would know something about jumps from watching rinkmates, but the detail in Poodle’s commentary seems to come from personal experience. Poodle hasn’t talked much about his own skating, unfortunately, even when Yuuri manages to find questions that don’t seem out of character; a few times Poodle has brushed it off as _boring_ , and pushed the topic back to Yuuri. But Poodle definitely knows how to land a triple flip. “I guess you’re right, yeah.” 

“So there are really only three people to consider,” Phichit says. “It’s too bad none of my friends were at the banquet that night, or I’d already have all the details dragged out of them.”

“I don’t know if it was the banquet or something that happened afterwards,” Yuuri points out, thinking of Tiger’s reference to katsudon. He’d thought of texting Michele Crispino or Cao Bin—they’re not friends, but he does have their numbers—but couldn’t think of how to ask the question. _Was I being particularly friendly with anyone at the banquet in Sochi? Do you happen to know the identity of my secret friend?_

“Well, either way, I’m working on other ideas, I promise.” 

The afternoon, though, brings an opportunity that’s not of Phichit’s doing.

 **Poodle**  
Yuuuuri do you have any comment on the fact that you are ranked second on “Top Ten Butts in Men’s Figure Skating for 2015”??? https://fsranker.com/2015butts 🤣🤣🤣 2:02 PM

The butt-blog has ranked Victor third, below Yuuri, which is laughable. 

“Yeah, but it’s useful,” Phichit says, when he finds Yuuri in the kitchen, staring at the text while his pot of instant noodles boils over on the stove. “For finding out if it’s Victor, I mean. Ask him … I know. Ask him how he found it. Maybe he’ll say he was googling himself.”

 **Katsuki Yuuri**  
no comment!!! 2:03 PM  
how did you find that site anyway? 2:03 PM

 **Poodle**  
I follow all the good skater butt sites! 2:03 PM  
it’s good to have hobbies Yuuri 😉 2:04 PM

“Ugh.” Phichit frowns and pulls Yuuri’s noodles off the boil and inspects the half-mixed peanut sauce Yuuri has on the counter. “No good.” 

“The text or the sauce?”

“Both!” He sighs and begin pulling down bottles from the cupboards. “Okay, keep him talking. More butt talk.”

 **Katsuki Yuuri**  
the rankings are clearly wrong 2:05 PM  
particularly the top three 2:05 PM

But either Poodle isn’t Victor, or he isn’t interested in defending the honour of his butt: _of course it’s wrong! your butt is clearly superior to that Canadian hack, his ass is flatter than blinchiki_.

“Huh. Well, no problem,” Phichit says, pushing the bowl back across the counter. From the smell, Yuuri can tell that Phichit has somehow transformed the sauce from wan to palatable. “The Russian Nationals are at the same time as All-Japan, right? You can use that to find out more.”

###

**Sapporo, Japan  
Thursday, December 24, 2015**

Yuuri arrives in Sapporo to find messages waiting from Poodle that reinforce the theory that Yuuri had dragged Poodle and Tiger out to search for comfort food in the streets of Sochi after the banquet.

 **Poodle**  
how is the katsudon in Sapporo? better than in Detroit? 12:21 PM  
I tried some in St. Petersburg but I don’t know if it would meet your standards 12:21 PM  
I liked it though!!! 12:22

He answers while he waits in line to check in at the hotel, behind a cluster of other skaters. Some of them look vaguely familiar, maybe from last year’s Nationals, but it’s the chatter that gives them away: the mirror-lined lobby is filled with talk of jump value, the event schedule, the draw for skate order.

 **Katsuki Yuuri**  
it’s okay I guess 2:52 PM  
the katsudon in Sapporo, I mean 2:52 PM  
but it’s not the same as it was in Hasetsu 2:53 PM

It’s never the same as it was in Hasetsu, no matter where he finds it; it always feels like the flavour is just … off. But that’s probably his imagination, because Yuuri hasn’t eaten his mother’s katsudon in five years. The last time had been the day before he’d left for Detroit, to begin training with Celestino. He remembers smiling, trying to hide how scared he was; he remembers trying to act normal around Vicchan, so that his dog wouldn’t know that Yuuri was leaving. He doesn’t really remember the flavour, not anymore, can’t feel the crunch of the breaded pork against the roof of his mouth. 

“It’s Katsuki Yuuri,” someone hisses, as Yuuri turns away from the check-in counter, keycard in hand. “We’re at the same hotel. We’re staying at the same hotel as he is!”

Yuuri glances over before he can stop himself, spotting a boy with a bright wave of red hair emerging from a sea of yellow-blond. With his big eyes and over-developed incisor, the boy has the look of a character out of a school anime. When he catches Yuuri’s glance, his eyes widen and he ducks behind the older woman he’s standing with. The woman—coach, Yuuri thinks, this must be the boy’s coach—smiles gently, undisturbed.

“You’ll have to forgive Minami-kun, he’s looked up to you for years,” she says, inclining her head to Yuuri. Behind her, the boy squeaks, indignant. 

“Not just years! _Forever!_ ” 

“Me?” Yuuri says, startled. He actually turns to look behind him, to see if there’s someone else she might be talking to, but then remembers that the boy had referred to him by name. “I mean … thank you, I guess.” He’s been trying to be more gracious with his fans—Victor has been known to sign autographs for hours at a time—but after fifteen hours in the air and three hours wandering around Haneda on layover, Yuuri’s energy is as low as his alcohol tolerance. Besides, he’s permeated with the baked-onion scent of travel sweat. He doesn’t want to get too close. “Well, uh, nice to meet you, uh …”

“Minami Kenjirou!” the boy says, popping back out from his behind his coach and blocking Yuuri’s path to the elevators. “You’re my hero, Katsuki-san! Could I have your autograph? And can you give me any tips on my triple axel? Yours has always been so good!”

“I, uh,” Yuuri says, patting awkwardly at his jacket pocket. The half-eaten pack of kiwi Hi Chew he’d picked up in the airport in Tokyo crinkles under his hand, but there’s no pen. He doesn’t carry a pen with him, because mostly people don’t want his autograph. Why would they? He’s Katsuki Yuuri, just another dime-a-dozen figure skater certified by the JSF. “I don’t have a pen, uh. Do you—do you want a Hi Chew? Here, take this, I probably wasn’t going to finish it anyway—” and he scrambles away, blushing, leaving the pack pressed into Minami’s hand. Never meet your idols, Yuuri thinks, that’s the lesson here. They might offer to take a commemorative photo, or force you to take their leftover candy. 

The hotel room, when he gets to it, is a hotel room. They’re all cut from the same cloth, these rooms, as if there’s an assembly line somewhere where they’re stamped out and stitched together: two beds and too many pillows and abstract landscapes above the headboards, heavy beige curtains and a mini-fridge below the TV, the air conditioning set just a touch too low. Yuuri tunnels under the fluffy white hotel duvet and curls up in the cloudy space beneath it. He wonders, absently, how long he could stay under there before someone came looking for him. A long time, probably, since Celestino doesn’t get in until later tonight.

He pulls out his phone and hesitates for a moment before sending a question.

 **Katsuki Yuuri**  
do you think my triple axel is good? like, especially good? 3:05 PM

 **Poodle**  
definitely!!! it was one of the first things I noticed about you Yuuri 3:06 PM  
I thought it was funny you could do it so well but struggled with easier jumps 3:06 PM

Phichit has a theory that the Final wasn’t Poodle’s first encounter with Yuuri’s skating. Yuuri considers for a minute, and then texts back:

 **Katsuki Yuuri**  
how long have you been watching me skate? 3:08 PM

 **Poodle**  
I saw you skate last year at Rostelecom!!! 3:08 PM  
your step sequence was amazing 3:09 PM  
I mean the rest of the program wasn’t great but you know that Yuuri 3:09 PM  
afterwards I thought that if you can do a step sequence like THAT you can figure out the rest of it too 😜 3:10 PM

Which is a pretty typical Poodle thing to say (Rostelecom, 2014: sixth-place finish after a lacklustre short program and dismal free skate), but it doesn’t really help narrow anything down, other than to suggest that it’s not Victor. The Victor who’d spoken to him after the Final had clearly never heard of Katsuki Yuuri, let alone watched him skate. 

That evening, Yuuri watches the livestream of the Russian men’s short program on his laptop while eating room service, and when Victor skates to the centre of the ice, Yuuri implements Phichit’s plan and sends a text: _I’ve been thinking about that butt ranking thing_. Then he waits, stomach twisting. Victor skates beautifully, clean as usual, and there’s no response, not right away, not for twenty minutes, not for an hour. Then he gets back _oh so now you accept that you should have been on top of the podium? you deserve that gold Yuuri!_ , which means it could still be Victor. It could still be _Victor_. When he tries to picture Stammi Vicino Promotional Poster Victor saying _you deserve that gold Yuuri!_ , though, nothing happens. Victor Nikiforov complimenting his butt? Impossible.

He sends an update to Phichit, who has just woken up. _OK great!!!_ Phichit replies. _Now you just need to do the same thing during the pairs skate._

Celestino arrives around nine and drops by Yuuri’s room to reel off some last-minute thoughts on his programs. “This should be straightforward, Yuuri, there’s not really anyone in your league here right now,” he says, while Yuuri lies on the bed, falling slowly into jet lag’s undertow. “Get a good sleep tonight, and in the morning we’ll see how you’ve been doing without me.”

 _Just fine_ , Yuuri thinks, and then immediately feels guilty. “You don’t have to come to the practice time tomorrow morning,” he mutters, face in the pillow. He knows, in a practical way, that he needs a coach if he wants to compete at the highest levels, but sometimes it feels like Celestino is just another person to hold his breath at the side of the rink and wait for Yuuri to fuck it all up again. Yuuri can handle _that_ just fine all by himself, thank you. “It’ll be like getting up at midnight for you. I can practice without you.” 

Celestino sighs. “I’m your coach, Yuuri. It’s my job to be there with you.” 

“Okay,” Yuuri says, too tired to argue. “Yeah. See you in the morning.” 

He’s asleep before the Russian pairs short program even begins.

###

_(Live footage of Katsuki Yuuri performing his short program at the All-Japan Figure Skating Championships at Makomanai Sekisui Heim Ice Arena in Sapporo. He is wearing a pale blue high-necked silk shirt with flowing sleeves and tight black pants; the music is melancholy, filled with the sighs and sobs of a string orchestra. )_

**Morooka Hisashi** : _(voiceover)_ … next up is the triple axel … nailed it! And right into the step sequence … he’s flying tonight. This is the Katsuki Yuuri we’d been expecting at the Grand Prix Final … _(while Yuuri performs the step sequence)_ Since his tenth-place finish at the Olympics in Sochi in 2014, Katsuki has made a steady climb through the rankings. This could be his year … 

Here comes the quad toe loop … he wobbled on the landing but kept it together. Moving in to the back half of the program now, no signs that he’s flagging …

###

**Interlude: Tiger**

**Yekaterinburg, Russia  
Friday, December 25, 2015**

Somehow, through no fault of his own, Yuri Plisetsky ends up sitting beside Victor Nikiforov at dinner, jammed into the back corner of the wooden booth at Nigora. It is, he thinks, the worst thing that has ever happened to him. He has Victor’s elbow in his face any time Victor reaches for the plate of manti. He has Victor yelling “Yurio! Yurio” in his ear—“that is _not_ my name,” he grits out, but Victor ignores him, as usual—whenever Victor wants him to pay attention to his boring fucking stories. Worst of all, he has a front-row seat for Victor’s increasingly sappy texts to the Japanese piggy. 

“He’s asleep by now,” Yuri says, squirming away as Victor attempts to wrangle him into a selfie. He did not agree to this, Yuri thinks. He didn’t agree to any of this. Going to the banquet in Sochi, and then participating in a dance-off and accompanying Victor and fucking Katsudon on a wild dash through the city afterwards are Yuri’s greatest regrets in this life. “Shut up, I’m not taking a picture. He’s not even getting your crappy messages. It’s midnight in Sapporo. Stop it, Victor”—this as Victor puts him in a headlock and snaps the photo—“don’t you fucking send that to him …”

“There, he’ll love that,” Victor says, triumphant, labelling it _Congratulations from Poodle and Tiger!_ “Did you watch his short program, Yurio? It was very good.” 

“I have better things to do than watch third-rate skaters from other countries,” Yuri mutters, and puts his head down over his grilled trout. The faster he eats, the faster he can leave, and get away from these assholes. On the other side of the table, Mila Babicheva yells something about lifting Georgi Popovich over her head to see how far she can throw him. Georgi pays no attention, too wrapped up in hand-feeding his ice dance girlfriend to give a shit about Mila’s ramblings. Yuri doesn’t give a shit about Mila’s ramblings either, but they’re better than whatever Victor is talking about now. 

“… took my advice about the flip. He could land it as a quad, I think, if—”

“I don’t care,” Yuri mutters. He stares up at the vaulted wood beam ceiling, the gold and crimson tapestries hanging there, and wills it all to fall. If he’s crushed now he won’t have to hear about the other Yuuri ever again. Of course, probably if it happened Victor would just hop back up and say, _oh this will be a funny story to tell Yuuri_. “I really don’t care.”

Victor’s phone buzzes and he holds it aloft, triumphant. “He wrote back! I knew he wasn’t asleep!”

“Who is he talking about?” Mila asks, grabbing the lobio out from in front of Yuuri. He tries to snatch it back a beat too late. He’ll need to be quicker if he’s going to beat Victor this year. (Which he _absolutely fucking is_ ). “Is this his Japanese boyfriend again? Victor, what did he do to you? You’re so much more …” she shrugs, expressively, and Yuri thinks _happy_ and _alive_ and _interested in something other than skating for once_ and then, even more, _interested in skating again_ , because it’s not that he’s been paying any attention whatsoever to Victor Nikiforov but anybody who’s met the man more than once can see the difference. He might as well be wearing a shirt that says _Katsuki Yuuri lights up my life_. It’s gross. It’s fucking gross. 

“We’re not dating,” Victor says, dignified. “Yet. And he didn’t do anything to me! Oh, damn, he says he can’t get photos on his phone. We’ll have to show him that one later.”

Yuri is absolutely not looking at Victor’s phone, he is only looking across the restaurant to where a totally normal and not ridiculously aggravating family is happily eating together, but somehow he still sees what Victor texts back: _ok Yuuri you’ll just have to picture me hugging a tame little tiger cub!_

“I’m not a fucking—” Yuri growls, grabbing for the phone, but Victor’s arms are longer and there’s nothing he can do about it. He pulls out his own phone instead and fires off a message to Katsudon: _tell your boyfriend he can fuck right off_. Victor laughs and ruffles his hair and then tosses his own phone across the table. 

“Take a better picture of us, Georgi, I’ll save it to show to Yuuri when we’re at Worlds,” he says. “Get my good angle—no, wait, I want my hair to look perfect, hold on,” and Mila and Anya are laughing and Yuri is trying to rescue his own hair from the ridiculous snarl Victor made of it, when the phone rings in Georgi’s hand. 

“Allo?” he yells into it, sounding mildly angry, or maybe constipated. He always sounds like that, though. Georgi is stiffer than his terrible hair. “Who’s this?”

There’s a response of some sort, and then Georgi puts the phone down, shrugging. 

“Who was it? Why did you answer?” Victor says, grabbing for his phone and almost knocking a glass of vodka into Yuri’s lap. This time his reaction time is good enough to catch it. Better, he thinks. Better. “Was it Yuuri?”

“He said _wrong number_ in English and then hung up,” Georgi says, and turns back to finger-feeding Anya. “You shouldn’t give me your phone if you don’t want me to answer it.”

Once Victor gets the phone back, Yuri can see that the caller actually was Katsudon. Victor hesitates, then types: _did you call me?_ and after a moment the response comes back: _Sorry, butt dial_. Yuri takes a too-big bite of potato and doesn’t look.

 **Vitya**  
should I call you? I can call you if you want! 8:42 PM

“He doesn’t want you to call,” Yuri mutters. “He said he only called you by accident, see?”

 **♥️♥️♥️ Yuuri ♥️♥️♥️**  
no, no, please don’t 8:42 PM  
I don’t really like talking on the phone 8:42 PM  
anyway I need to go back to sleep, it’s late 8:43 PM

 **Vitya**  
sleep tight Yuuri 🥰 8:43 PM

Disgusting, Yuri thinks. The potatoes are threatening to come back up. If they do, he decides, he’ll make sure that they go all over Victor.

###

**Sapporo, Japan  
Saturday, December 26, 2015**

Yuuri wakes the morning of the free skate with the weight of an ocean on his chest. 

He struggles to take in one breath, and then another. There are eight hours until the start of the free skate, he thinks, and he has to breathe through all of them, he has to breathe in every second of every minute, that’s sixty by sixty by eight and that’s—he can’t do the math. He can’t do anything but stare at the icy white sheet of the hotel room ceiling, thinking about the weight his lungs carry each day. 

Yesterday it had been fine. The world had been light, so light he’d been able to lift off with it, rotate in counterbalance to the Earth’s spin. Today, though—

Today, it feels heavier. 

Today, he has to carry the face Minami Kenjirou made when he saw Yuuri after the short program, the face that said _you can do no wrong_ , a face meant for another version of Yuuri, one that can put aside the past and go back out and skate clean. _Don’t you know that tomorrow is the free skate?_ he’d wanted to yell. _The free skate is where I fuck up._

Today, he has to carry Phichit calling at 5 a.m. Detroit time to say “Merry Christmas! I’ve got a gift waiting for you after you come back from kicking butt,” and remembering that he’s the asshole who forgot to get his roommate and best friend a Christmas gift. He’d wanted to say _thank you_ , not for the gift but for everything else, for all the times time Phichit has tried to distract him from his anxieties, to make Yuuri feel better about his career, but the words had stuck in his mouth. It sounded too much like _goodbye_ , an acknowledgment that if he flubbed Nationals he wouldn’t be in Detroit for much longer. 

Today, he has to carry Morooka saying, “Glad to see you back in top form” in the interview scrum, rather than asking a real question, probably because he could see that Yuuri was too fragile to answer _How do you feel about your chances tomorrow? Have you resolved the problems you had in Sochi?_

And today, most of all, he has to carry Mari’s phone call. 

“You were great tonight,” she’d said, when she’d called after the short program. “Everyone’s excited. I’m sorry I couldn’t get away to come up to Sapporo to watch, but there’ll be a whole crowd at the onsen cheering for you during the free skate. Minako-sensei is coming and Yuuko-chan is letting the triplets stay up late.” The triplets had been squalling babes the last time he’d seen them. Now, apparently, they were old enough to skate, and calculate point value for a jump in real time. Old enough to watch him fall. 

“It’s weird, though,” Mari had continued, quietly. “Watching without Vicchan, I mean. He always used to sit right in front of the TV, and bark whenever they said your name.”

Yuuri doesn’t think he can carry that.

###

There’s an 11:30 a.m. practice time scheduled for the senior men. Yuuri drags himself out of bed at 10:45 and goes downstairs and out of the lobby—a hundred reflected Minami Kenjirous wave and yell “Katsuki-san! Katsuki-san, do you want to walk to the rink together?”—and then twenty minutes later he blinks and finds himself in the soft hills to the west of the hotel, the snow-dusted pinnacle of Mount Moiwa rising gently above him. He’s nowhere near Makomanai.

Maybe it’s good to be lost, Yuuri thinks. Maybe if it has his body for company, his heart won’t feel so alone. 

When he turns a random corner, he spots the station building for the Mount Moiwa Ropeway, curled in the bare arms of the trees at the mountain’s base. He gives in easily to the pull of it: for the low, low price of 1,800円, someone else will carry him for a while, lift him so high that his problems will no longer be visible. 

“One ticket, please,” he says to the attendant in the booth, suppressing a shiver. He’d thrown on a coat when leaving the hotel, but he’s not really dressed for an extended period outside, where the cold is more unpredictable than in the rink. 

“Round-trip or one way?”

Yuuri thinks about _one way_ and then says, too spineless to fully commit to running away, “Round trip.” 

The glass-walled gondola is packed, warm with tourists jostling against the windows to look down on the city below. The automated voice of the announcer is a mellow blur, directing them to _look here_ , _look here_. Rather than jostling for a spot place against the city-view window, Yuuri retreats to the other end, staring at the peak above. The wires between the steel suspension towers loop up, up, up, inscribing figures against the snowdrift sky. The tree branches are wearing the night’s snowfall: a winter cloak over naked shoulders, white hem dragging along the ground. He feels like he could look up forever and never see his destination.

When Yuuri puts a hand on the chill glass, it leaves a print, a mark that fades when he pulls away. An ephemeral, passing thing. He pulls out his phone and looks again at the texts from the day before: the shock of _tell your boyfriend he can fuck right off_ and then Yuuri’s own frantic scramble to avoid the possibility of another phone call when he’d realized he couldn’t put a name to the low, sharp voice on the other end of the phone. Calling had been a mistake; his instincts had been blurred by sleep, flustered by the _boyfriend_ text. He’d forgotten that it would be hard to hide that he didn’t know who he was talking to without the lag time and carefully-plotted replies of text. 

(He’d called because he’d thought he might know the voice. Had hoped it might be familiar from every Victor Nikiforov interview he’s ever watched.) 

Yuuri hasn’t really processed yet that the voice wasn’t Victor’s, that Poodle almost certainly isn’t Victor. Does that really matter, though, he wonders? Does he want so badly for Victor to admire his skating, to see him as a worthy competitor? For it to be Victor that’s been watching him skate? 

( _Yes_ and _yes_ and _yes_ , his mind answers.)

This time, Yuuri leans his forehead against the glass, watches how the surface mists up on his exhale and clears on the inhale. Through the damp patch, the cable car is visible where it snakes up to the summit from the transfer station. 

His phone buzzes, rattling where he has it pressed against the glass.

 **Poodle**  
ready for today Yuuri? you won’t forget what I said about your speed going into that second-half combination? 11:02 AM

 **Katsuki Yuuri**  
I can’t do it 11:02 AM  
I don’t think I can do it 11:02 AM

There’s a pause before the response, longer than usual. The announcer tells everyone to look out at the Peace Pagoda to the north, and the gondola swings slightly with the weight of feet shifting to one side. Yuuri doesn’t look. _The combination?_ Poodle says. _Why not?_

Yuuri closes his eyes and pictures Poodle standing there beside him, one hand on the glass, framing the view. He pictures Victor, even though he shouldn’t. He pictures silver hair, mercury lit by moonlight, and bright blue eyes. It helps the words come.

 **Katsuki Yuuri**  
my dog died 11:04 AM  
the day before the free skate in Sochi 11:04 AM  
and then I fucked everything up because I’m weak 11:05 AM  
and now I’m probably going to screw up my free skate again 11:05 am  
and so I think maybe it would just be better if I didn’t do it at all 11:05 AM

The tourists murmur in excitement about some aspect of the view, cameras clicking. _I’m sorry, you don’t need to hear all this, I know you have to skate today too_ , Yuuri adds. This is a safe comment, since the pairs’ and men’s free skates are both this afternoon in Yekaterinburg. He hates that he has to think this way.

 **Poodle**  
you’re not weak, Yuuri 11:06 AM  
if my dog died right before a skate I don’t think I could go on the ice 11:07 AM  
but you can’t let one bad skate hold you back 11:07 AM  
do you want that to be the thing you’re remembered for? quitting because you fell down a few times? 11:07 AM  
I wouldn’t want that as my legacy 11:08 AM

Yuuri actually laughs when he reads _the thing you’re remembered for_. The sound bounces off the glass walls of the gondola, brittle, sharp. Poodle is thinking of someone else, of the same version of Yuuri that Minami Kenjirou has apparently been watching. He won’t be remembered for _anything_ ; a year from now there will be a whole new crop of up-and-coming skaters, their blades erasing whatever faint lines Katsuki Yuuri has left on the ice. And the idea that he could have anything that might be called a _legacy_ is absurd. He’s not Victor Nikiforov, with five consecutive Worlds and Grand Prix wins and two Olympics golds and the quad flip. He’s not even Seung-gil Lee, who will forever have the quad loop. 

_I’m not very good at dealing with people when they’re upset_ , Poodle continues. _I don’t really know what to say in this situation … if I was in there in person I’d just kiss you or something._

Oh god. _No no no!_ he writes. ( _Kiss you?_ What had he _done_ at the banquet?) _I’m sorry to unload on you, it’s not your problem. It’s just that it felt sometimes like my dog was the only who really believed in me, and now he’s gone._

The gondola passes the last suspension tower with a clunk, pulls to a shivering stop. Yuuri blinks against the darkened interior of the station.

 **Poodle**  
I believe in you, Yuuri 11:09 AM  
will you believe that? 11:09 AM

He stares at the message, blinking again and again, as the tourists push past him to exit. 

“Are you coming out?” the attendant asks, when she leans in and finds Yuuri standing in the back corner of the gondola. 

“Can I—can I ride back down?” 

“You don’t want to take the cable car?” The attendant looks confused, scrunching her nose at him. “This isn’t the summit, you know.” 

“I know. I want to go back down. I need to go back.” 

She shrugs. “That’s fine, I guess. There’s no-one waiting right now, so it’ll just be you.” 

On the way down, Yuuri faces the city. It spreads out around him, gleaming icy-white. When he looks to the south, he can see the rink, pressed like a thumbprint into the snowy parkland along the river. It doesn’t seem so scary from up here, just one building among thousands. 

Celestino picks up right away when he calls. “Yuuri? Where are you? I’m at the rink.”

“I’m going to be a little late,” Yuuri says. “Sorry, I just … I just. Anyway, I’m on my way.” 

“You need any help getting here?” Celestino says, gentle, softer than the back pat he’d given Yuuri in the Kiss and Cry after the short program. 

“No. No, I’m good,” he says. Poodle believes in him, he thinks. Poodle can carry some of the weight. It doesn’t really matter who he is, in the face of that. 

This time, when Yuuri breathes in, it’s deep, easy.

###

 **FS Newswire** — December 26, 2015 — Among junior men, Yuri Plisetsky added to his Junior Grand Prix Final gold with a place at the top of the podium at the Russian Figure Skating Championships. He is expected to skate at the senior level beginning next season. His performances over the last year have drawn comparisons to his rinkmate, Victor Nikiforov …

###

The idea comes to Yuuri between one jump and the next—not his own jumps, but Victor’s, as he watches Stammi Vicino on a television in one of the warm-up areas in Makomanai. Yuuri is supposed to be limbering up, because he’s due on the ice in fifteen minutes, but he’s wrestled the television over to the proceedings in Yekaterinburg because he wants to see Victor skate. He always wants to watch Victor skate. 

Celestino, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, hasn’t commented on the channel change. He’s used to Yuuri. In the morning, when Yuuri had arrived at the rink fifteen minutes late and out of breath, Celestino had only nodded a greeting and said, “Well, let’s get started, then.” 

“Is that the Russian Nationals?” Minami says, from the other side of the hallway. Yuuri had grown a second shadow when the kid had come off the ice twenty minutes ago, a shadow that followed him through the hallways and commented enthusiastically on each aspect of Yuuri’s warmup. 

“Yes,” Yuuri grunts, pretending to stretch out his shoulder joints, but really mimicking the elegant arm movements in Victor’s step sequence. He wonders what it would feel like to skate a program like that, brimming with confidence, certain of your place on the ice. How it would feel to know that your legacy was cemented long ago, that there was nothing left to prove. 

“Oh! You’re scouting the competition, that’s a good idea!” 

Yuuri doesn’t turn around, just moves on to hip rolls, keeping his eyes on the screen. If this is scouting out the competition, he’s been doing it his whole life, because he’s always been watching Victor. And anyway, he’s not really competition for Victor, is he? At the Final, all Yuuri had done was soil the ice with his butt print before Victor went on to skate. Poodle could never have been Victor, because why would Victor care enough to watch Yuuri’s skating? 

“Oh! Was that a quad flip?” Minami says, as if he’s surprised, as if he doesn’t know that Victor is _known_ for his quad flip, and that’s when it all clicks. In the time it takes Victor to cross the ice, turn, and launch into his triple lutz-triple toe combination, Yuuri climbs down a string of disjointed thoughts, rendered in bursts that approximate drunken Yuuri: _What legacy? Victor has the quad flip. Seung-gil has the quad loop. Just one quad that no-one has landed in competition … your triple axel is especially good …_

It’s a terrible idea and Yuuri knows it. He only lands one quad consistently enough for Celestino to choreograph it into his programs; he’s landed a clean quad salchow in practice maybe ten times. The thought of trying to land a quad axel is fantastical. The odds of it happening are probably lower than Yuuri stumbling over a kappa while running along the Detroit River.

And yet: I’m going to learn how to do it, he thinks, as Victor strikes the final pose of his program. I’m going to skate on the same ice as Victor again and when that happens, I’ll have something worth watching. Maybe at Worlds—they’re three months away, plenty of time … 

When Yuuri glides out to centre ice, the usual dull blade of his thoughts is honed to two shining edges. There’s _I believe in you, Yuuri_. And then, when he leans into the music, there’s the incredible thought, the path forward: _a quad axel_.

###

_(Replay footage of Katsuki Yuuri performing his free skate at the All-Japan Figure Skating Championships at Makomanai Sekisui Heim Ice Arena in Sapporo, and then standing at the top of the podium. )_

Morooka Hisashi _(voiceover)_ : Katsuki rebounded from his disappointing finish at the Grand Prix Finals with two solid skates at All-Japan, defending his title with a total score of 259.56. Upcoming skaters to watch include 16-year-old Minami Kenjirou, who …

###

 **Victor’s golden skate blades** @nikiforovfanatic  
that was the best version of Stammi Vicino he’s done all season, right? I’m not imagining this?

 **quello che fa per te** @VICTORious  
Replying to @nikiforovfanatic  
it was his best score so if you’re imagining it then so are the judges

 **mila b, where the b is for badass** @icegoddess  
Replying to @nikiforovfanatic and @VICTORious  
that was the best his BUTT’s looked all season I’ll tell you that for free

 **Victor’s golden skate blades** @nikiforovfanatic  
Replying to @VICTORious  
yeah but that’s not what I’m talking about, I mean he seemed like he was … more into it, maybe? like he FELT it more?

 **Angel Wings** @ThePlisetskySupremacy  
Replying to @nikiforovfanatic  
Victor better watch out, next year Yuri’s going to be the one to beat!!!

###

 **Tiger**  
not bad 8:42 PM  
still not good enough but not bad 8:42 PM

 **Katsuki Yuuri**  
thanks? I guess? 8:43 PM

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another time-related point (this may become a theme here): I wanted to be able to use the actual performance times for the Japanese and Russian Nationals in 2015, but had to make some adjustments for plot reasons. (The dates/times for the senior free skates moved around, and I moved the Junior Nationals so that they took place at the same time and in the same location as the senior ones.) All the event times/dates for the Japanese Nationals are taken from real life, though, because this is the sort of verisimilitude I ~~like to think about~~ get hung up on. 
> 
> “Allo” (Алло) is a Russian greeting that's only used on the phone.


	3. Second Rotation

**Barcelona, Spain  
Saturday, December 10, 2016  
ISU Grand Prix Final, Men’s Free Skate**

_(Live footage of Katsuki Yuuri on the ice at the Centre de Conventions International de Barcelona, waiting for his free skate to begin. He is wearing black pants and a simple purple silk shirt dusted with a smattering of rainbow sequins.)_

**Morooka Hisashi** : _(voiceover)_ … begins the free skate in fifth. Katsuki’s qualification for the Final was a surprise, after he struggled to return from what many thought might be a career-ending injury. His appearance here today is only as a result of another skater’s injury—defending Grand Prix Final silver medallist Christophe Giacometti withdrew after injuring his ankle at the Rostelecom Cup, opening a spot for Katsuki, the next-closest qualifier … 

_(The music begins.)_

He is skating to “Yuri on Ice” …

###

**Interlude: Phichit**

**Detroit, Michigan  
Late December, 2015**

“Phichit,” Yuuri says, sliding up against the boards. 

Phichit looks up from his phone, where he’s trying to decide between two selfies. The angle on one is bad, cutting off the very top of his head, but his smile looks fake in the other one. “What’s up?” 

Yuuri’s been acting weird ever since he came back from Sapporo, which isn’t exactly unusual—Phichit worries most about his roommate whenever Yuuri starts pretending to be normal—but what is strange is that he can’t figure out the source of Yuuri’s current passion. Usually, the reason for Yuuri’s hyper-obsessions is clear: Victor Nikiforov is horny idolization, trying to learn to cook is homesickness, pole dancing is an attempt to manufacture social confidence. Somehow, though, the history of quads has managed to overtake both Victor and Poodle as Yuuri’s favourite topic of conversation, all without any obvious motive. Yesterday, Yuuri had forced him to watch the video of Kurt Browning landing the first ratified quad in competition, at the Worlds in ’88, and then explained (intensely—very intensely) that the Canadian skater had come in sixth—“which was a disappointment, maybe? But it didn’t _matter_ , right, because he landed the quad. Brian Boitano won gold but Kurt Browning _made history_.” 

“The quad lutz,” Yuuri says now, clearly excited. “Did you know that Brandon Mroz came in ninth at NHK when he landed it? But I bet you can’t tell me who _won_ that year, can you?” 

“No, I can’t,” Phichit agrees. He decides on the angled pic, because social media is like figure skating: you can put up with technical flaws as long as the emotions are right. He captions it with _Finally! Snow!_ and sets it to post. Then, because Yuuri seems to be waiting for some additional response, he says, “But there’s only one quad left, right? And neither of us are going to be the one to land it!”

Yuuri shrugs and grabs his glasses from their resting place on the edge of the boards. The glare of the rink lights on the lenses obscure his eyes for a moment. “Yeah. I guess.” 

Phichit sighs and kicks himself for deflating the balloon of Yuuri’s excitement, whatever its source. Yuuri drags around every fall, every failure, like they’re a burden he’s cursed to carry for eternity; he needs all the moments of joy he can get, just to balance it out. 

“Come on, let’s go play in the snow and then post the pictures to your social media,” he suggests, poking Yuuri in the arm. “We can see which Russian skaters like the pics. Maybe Victor, right?”

“It’s not Victor,” Yuuri mutters. “I told you, the voice was wrong. And I can’t remember my password for Instagram or Twitter.” 

Phichit, who subscribes to the theory that Yuuri (who has never once, not in the entire time that Phichit has known him, noticed when someone is flirting with him) entirely misread the whole “take a photo with me” situation with Victor, is not about to let a few words in Russian remove Victor Nikiforov from top spot on his list of “could be Poodle” candidates. Yuuri doesn’t even know what the person picking up _said_. Maybe it was _Oh shit, I just stole Victor Nikiforov’s phone! I’d better give it back to him._

“I’ll post it on mine, okay?” he says, soothing. “Let’s go.”

###

_(A photograph of Yuuri trying to balance on a garbage can lid while sliding down a short, snowy slope; the camera has caught him with his arms windmilling, moments before falling off)._

**phichit+chu** What does everyone think? Does Katsuki Yuuri have a future in another Winter Olympic sport???

**Liked by pavkarev92, k+bakarov, v_nikiforov and 5,400 others**

###

**Detroit, Michigan  
Late December, 2015 - Early January, 2016**

Yuuri doesn’t mean to keep it a secret—not really, not at first—but when he tries to tell Celestino about the quad axel while they’re waiting at the baggage claim in DTW, the conversation runs away from him, crossing the border into awkward before he can wrench it back. (Just because Yuuri has a million visa stamps in his passport from awkward territory doesn’t mean he _wants_ to visit, not if he can avoid it.)

“I’ve been thinking about my program difficulty,” he starts. The gold medal from All-Japan is stuffed into the pocket of his carry-on bag; thinking about it gives him a boost of confidence. “About my quads.”

“We’ve talked about this before, Yuuri,” Celestino says, eyes closed. Yuuri thinks Celestino might still be mildly hungover; his ponytail is skulking sweatily towards his right shoulder, lacking its usual debonair swoosh. “We can talk about quads when you start landing the salchow regularly.”

“But if I did,” Yuuri persists, because it’s not as if he intends to _only_ work on the quad axel. He has the vague outlines of a plan, and it does include expanding his jump repertoire generally. “If I landed that one—”

“If you land it, we can talk about it then. It’s a waste of time to talk about it before then.” 

So, it’s awkward. Yuuri decides that he’ll tell Celestino once he’s got a solid plan. Maybe once he’s put something in a spreadsheet. 

And then, just when he’s warming up to share the idea with his roommate, Phichit says _neither of us are going to be the one to land it_ , and it seems like hubris to say _well actually that’s what I’m planning to do_ , and so in the end Yuuri only tells one person.

 **Katsuki Yuuri**  
I’ve been thinking that I want to try to ratify the quad axel 7:48 AM

(The first part of his plan is getting up earlier. He has that in the spreadsheet, in the column for “lifestyle changes.”)

Poodle doesn’t say _you?!?_ , with an incredulous-face emoji (Yuuri doesn’t know what emoji that would be but he’s sure there is one), or _you can’t do that_ or _I’ll believe that when I see it_. He just says:

 **Poodle**  
oh really? why would you want to do that??? 7:49 AM

Yuuri tries to come up with an answer while brushing his teeth and pulling half-clean gym clothes from the laundry hamper. He can’t exactly mention Victor as a reason, not without cutting that last slender thread of possibility—Phichit, despite all the evidence to the contrary, is still convinced that Victor is in the running—and he struggles to put the idea into words without saying _I want to prove something to someone_. While he trudges through grey snowdrifts on the way the gym, Yuuri writes and deletes four different messages. It’s not until he’s hesitating outside the gym door that he finds something that seems true.

 **Katsuki Yuuri**  
I guess it feels like something tangible 8:27 AM  
something I can point to, with my family, and say “see, it was worth it” 8:27 AM  
that everything they did for me had a result 8:27 AM  
and maybe I want to leave a mark? what you said about legacy, you know 8:28 AM  
I don’t know, that’s a mess, isn’t it? it probably doesn’t make any sense, sorry 8:28 AM

 _I understand, Yuuri_ , Poodle responds. _I didn’t mean that I didn’t understand why, I was just thinking about how risky it is._

At this hour, the gym is packed with undergrads from Wayne State. Yuuri, reminded that he has a half-credit of directed studies to finish up before he graduates, wonders absently whether he can integrate the quad axel into his project somehow. 

“Are you using this?” he says, to a man leaning against the leg extension machine, and gets a grunt—maybe a yes? maybe a no? maybe a _who are you to ask me such a thing?_ —in response. Instead of pressing it, he scuttles over to the weight benches, remembering now why he usually does his cross-training outside instead of at the gym. Yuuri never knows where to look while he’s here, either. A skater’s body is sometimes art, and sometimes a machine, and at the rink it’s okay—expected, even—to look, with the same focused gaze you might have while standing in front of _Sunrise over the Eastern Sea_ or peering in at an engine block. But the other thing in the “lifestyle changes” column is more weightlifting—he’ll need to add muscle in his legs to deal with the extra torque and impact force of the quad axel—so Yuuri tries his best to stare at the ceiling as he groans his way through a set of weighted split squats. 

_What does your coach say?_ Poodle asks, as he finishes up.

 **Katsuki Yuuri**  
well I uh 8:42 AM  
didn’t exactly tell him yet? 8:42 AM

 **Poodle**  
Yuuuuri!!! 🤣🤣🤣 8:43 AM  
well you know I love surprises ♥️ 8:43 AM  
you intend to practice at night? 8:44 AM

Yuuri grabs a medicine ball and begins a series of jump squats, considering that. Celestino doesn’t really like his skaters to practice without him, so unlike Hasetsu, where Yuuri had been free to skate at Ice Castle any time it wasn’t booked, he doesn’t have after-hours access to the rink. There have been times in Detroit where he’s woken at 3 a.m. in a cold sweat, wishing he could skate figures until his heartbeat slowed, and been forced to walk loops around the apartment building instead; it’s a terrible substitute. He hasn’t even done that lately, not since the Raccoon Dumpster Incident of September 2015. _I guess so, but I don’t have a key to the rink_. 

_Just ask for one! You’re Katsuki Yuuri, one of the top figure skaters in the world, they won’t say no!_

His stomach does something funny, at that, and he drops the medicine ball. It just misses his toe. He jams the phone away: it wouldn’t do to get injured in the first week of his plan just because he’s distracted by Poodle. 

That afternoon, Yuuri knocks softly on the door of the building supervisor’s office at the rink, breathing a little fast. He’s not exactly a master of subterfuge, so if the supervisor asks him whether this is okay with Celestino, Yuuri isn’t sure he can convincingly lie. 

“Oh, Yuuri! Good to see you! I watched your programs from All-Japan,” the supervisor says, when he opens the door. “Congratulations on the win!”

“Thanks,” he mumbles. 

“Could you autograph something for my granddaughter? You’re her favourite.” He indicates a picture of a little girl on the side of his busy desk, her round face and wavy blonde hair a tiny mimicry of his salty curls and benign grin. “I mean, she likes Phichit, too, don’t get me wrong, but she really likes your expressiveness. Told me she thinks you get underscored on the PCS.” 

“Uh. Thanks. Sure?” He takes the proffered pen. “What, uh, what do you want me to sign?”

The man, whose name Yuuri isn’t sure he actually knows—he sneaks a glance at the nameplate on the door; _Jacob Barrington_ —Jacob digs in an overflowing drawer and comes out with a copy of the 2015 rink calendar, which features a picture of Yuuri performing a camel spin in the November slot. “How about this? Can you make it out to Olivia?” 

He takes the opportunity to ask while he’s bent over the calendar, face obscured. “I was wondering—I came to ask—uh, I don’t know if this is something you do but it would be good if I could get in some practice time after hours sometimes, and I can’t …”

“Oh, you need a key?” There’s the sound of another drawer opening, and then a key ring jingling. “No problem, you just need to sign for it on the sheet.” 

It was that easy, Yuuri thinks, as he walks away with a copy of the rink key pressed into his sweaty palm. It had been that easy all along, and he’d just … never asked. 

“Where are you going?” Phichit says, when he sees Yuuri heading out at 10:45 that night, dressed in sweats. 

“For a run,” Yuuri says, trying not to sound cagey or fake. It ends up coming out a bit squeaky, but Phichit, who is rewatching _The King and the Skater_ for the five millionth time, just nods. 

“Watch out for the racoons!”

The snow under the streetlights is the colour of hazard warnings. Yuuri ignores the omen. He knows what he’s doing: there are no dangers here he hasn’t foreseen. _I’m going to the rink now!_ he texts to Poodle. 

Inside, he switches the bank of overhead lights on with a heavy clunk, sparking the halogens into life. It’s 11 p.m. in Detroit and 7 a.m. in St. Petersburg and still, when he gets to the centre of the ice, it feels like Poodle is there, somehow, standing on the ice beside him. He curls through a figure eight, blade brushing the ice, gentle as a bird’s wing. _It begins_ , he texts, and then feels a pink flush creep up his neck from the brash temerity of it. Like he’s really _doing something_ , not just coming to the rink to skate figures in a meditative loop in the middle of the night. But isn’t that the point? That he’s _doing something_ , for once?

 **Poodle**  
I believe in you, Yuuri!!! 11:02 PM

When he laughs, the cavernous curve of the empty rink hands it back to him, joyful.

###

**Detroit, Michigan  
January-February, 2016**

The strange thing about training to land a quad axel is that, at least at first, there’s almost no quad axel in it. 

There are quad salchows (somehow already improved, maybe just from the certainty that he’ll need to do them if he’s going to do the axel); quad flips (he lands one, over-rotated and touching down on the landing, in the second week of January, and then a few more in the weeks after); quad lutzes (landing thirty percent of attempts by the first week of February); and videos on YouTube, for research. Videos of skaters landing the quad axel in a harness—maybe he could try that, Yuuri decides, when he’s ready to tell Celestino—and videos of skaters landing the other quad jumps. Poodle has lots of suggestions, about cross-training and increasing his practice load at a pace that will avoid stress injuries, and lots of video recommendations. Some of the videos are of Victor doing the quad flip, but Poodle doesn’t comment on them other than to say _These are good examples I think!_

Even his schoolwork is axels without quads: Professor Kai agrees to let him do a literature review on axel-specific biomechanics and develop a strength and conditioning program around it. None of the articles he reviews discuss the quad axel—who would they study?—but even still, it’s the most useful work Yuuri’s done in the five years he’s been studying for his degree. All the exercises for the hip and shoulder flexors and abductors that he jams into the paper come right back out at the gym. He throws a lot of medicine balls. 

“You have a different energy lately, Yuuri,” Celestino says, after practice one day. “More focus. What is that?” 

“I don’t know,” Yuuri says. “I’ve been getting up earlier?”

Celestino narrows his eyes, like he can see that this is a lie—he probably can, Yuuri is a terrible liar—but he just says, “You’re not overtraining, are you?”

“No! No,” Yuuri says. “Why would you ask that?”

His coach sighs. “You’re not young anymore, Yuuri. Just be careful, alright?”

Hanging out with Poodle at the rink after hours quickly becomes the best part of Yuuri’s day. It’s strange to think of it that way, but it _does_ feel like hanging out, as Yuuri works through jumps and figures and Poodle gets up to go about his day.

 **Poodle**  
I think I need six more coffees before I can go to the rink this morning ☕️ 11:33 PM  
does your coach like to yell at you Yuuri, or is that just a Russian thing? 11:33 PM

 **Katsuki Yuuri**  
Celestino doesn’t really yell? he snaps a bit when he’s grumpy but mostly he just looks disappointed 11:34 PM  
I’m pretty used to it though 11:34 PM

Yuuri pauses to do a series of triple axels, trying to visualize his progress through the air, break the jump down into components: takeoff, timing, velocity, rotations, landing.

 **Poodle**  
I’m guess I’m used to the yelling, too! I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if there was no yelling in the Kiss and Cry 11:35 PM  
ok Yuuri let’s talk about something nicer than grumpy coaches 11:35  
do you have a favourite cafe? I want to know what you do in the morning, what you like to drink and what you like to eat 11:36 PM  
I feel like I should know this about you 11:36 PM

 **Katsuki Yuuri**  
there’s a little coffee shop by the rink that has decent sencha 11:44 PM  
and at least once a week they don’t charge me? it’s kind of weird but maybe they can tell I’m pretty broke 11:45 PM

 **Poodle**  
Yuuuuuuri 11:46 PM  
of course they give it to you for free! they recognize you!!! 🥰 11:46 PM

 **Katsuki Yuuri**  
what? really? 11:47 PM  
does that happen to you too? 11:47 PM  


**Poodle**  
😂😂😂 11:48 PM  
don’t you remember the falafel in Sochi?!? 11:48 PM

He doesn’t, of course. He remembers nothing but a soft blurry darkness, as if the night of the banquet was spent tucked under a thick winter quilt. Yuuri changes the topic, and tries to skate around the soft spots in the ice of his story. 

When they’re texting, Yuuri likes to picture them sitting in his old room at the onsen, on his bed, or lounging in the baths together. Now that he doesn’t think it could be Victor, he pictures Poodle obscured by steam, a formless, blurry figure, visible just out of the corner of his eye. Sometimes he imagines a phantom touch—on his elbow, on his shoulder, a gentle brush against his waist—when Poodle says something particularly encouraging. _Yuuri I’ve seen you skate enough to know that you have all the skills you need to win, you just need to put it all together. Why haven’t you?_

 _I don’t have a lot of confidence_. 

_You’ve got lots of confidence about the quad axel. Just apply that to everything else!!!_

Yuuri laughs. It’s true, he’s gone after the quad axel with an unfamiliar sort of stubborn determination, but … _You make it sound so easy_.

 _How many times do I have to tell you, Yuuri? I believe in you._ A gentle touch on the back of his hand, at that, as if Poodle is stroking a thumb over his knuckles. 

There are times when the urge to see Poodle in person, to talk without the walls built by distance and secrets, overwhelms him. Moments when their conversation feels like a song, rising to a crescendo, and then—a detuned radio, static, when Yuuri is forced to dodge some treacherous topic. In those moments, he wishes he was strong enough to be honest, and damn the consequences. 

One night, after Yuuri complains about flubbing too many quad flips, Poodle texts to say _I could call? I know you don’t like phones Yuuri but it might be easier to talk about the problem?_

Yuuri doesn’t answer for one minute, two, three. He does a triple flip, as a reset, and then another one. His palms are sweating. He doesn’t know how to answer. He doesn’t know what he would do if Poodle just called, if he’d let the phone ring and ring or if he’d gasp out a _Hello?_ at the last second. 

When he stops and skates over to the boards for his phone, though, Poodle’s answered for him.

 **Poodle**  
ok Yuuri I understand 11:15 PM  
maybe I come on a bit strong sometimes sorry 11:15 PM  
we can talk about things at Worlds, face to face 11:16 PM

 _Talk about what_ , Yuuri wonders. _Understand what._ It’s like they’re tiptoeing around some sleeping beast, except that Yuuri can’t see it and doesn’t know when he might accidentally step on its tail. _Yeah, Worlds_ , he says. _Worlds will be good_. 

“Is this bad?” Yuuri says, barging into Phichit’s room the next afternoon. Phichit is sitting on the bed, doing something on his laptop while the hamsters crawl over his lap. “Am I a bad person, I mean? For talking to Poodle when I don’t know who he is.” 

Phichit scrunches up his face. “I … well, it’s not … hm.” 

“It is bad. You think it’s bad.” 

“I don’t …” Phichit sighs, uncharacteristically hesitant. He waves, indicating that Yuuri should take a seat on the rumpled bedspread. Yuuri grabs a pillow and curls around it, pressing it into his stomach. “I mean. You could just tell him, right?” Yuuri’s silence answers—he _can’t_ , he couldn’t—and Phichit shrugs. “Okay, so, I don’t know? I mean … it seems like he likes you, right. He wants to _kiss_ you. And so I guess the question is whether you would date him, no matter which of them it turns out to be.” 

Yuuri stuffs his face into the pillow, breathing in the scent of Phichit’s minty shampoo. He can picture both of the pairs skaters: Konstantin Barakov is handsome in a severe sort of way, blond and sharp-jawed, while Pavel Karev is cute, younger, baby-faced. He has brown hair that waves back from his forehead and a cocky grin and broad nose that make him look a bit like a hockey player. Both of them are probably out of Yuuri’s league, honestly. All of his past relationships have been fumbling, short, uncertain; none of those experiences suggest he’d be a draw for a hot, successful figure skater. 

Would he date them? He thinks about the feeling he gets when a message comes in from Poodle, like the phone is a handful of fireflies, the glow leaking out between his fingers. “Yeah. Yeah, I would.” It comes out muffled, spoken into the thick down.

“Well then it’s not so bad, because at least you’re not leading him on, right? You like him for him, no matter who he is.” 

“That doesn’t make sense,” Yuuri says, with a laugh, lifting his head up. Phichit is good at this, at jollying him out of his concerns. He feels better. Mostly. There’s still a tiny shard of ice in his heart, but he thinks it’s melted enough for him to pretend it’s not there. 

“Yes it does! It makes complete sense! Which of us has more relationship experience?”

“Hey!” He smacks Phichit with the pillow. “Don’t remind me …”

That night, Phichit queues up interviews with Pavel Karev and Konstantin Barakov on YouTube and then, when Yuuri shakes his head and says “I don’t … I don’t remember what he sounded like that well. Maybe? It could be either of them?” they try the longshot, an interview with Andrei Fedorov. 

“No. Definitely not him.” Fedorov has a light, laughing voice, while the other two are both lower. 

“Maybe the voice doesn’t mean anything. It was noisy, right?” Phichit says. 

“I guess.” It’s funny, but he and Phichit have become closer, too, because of the whole Poodle thing. Not that they weren’t friends, before—Phichit is certainly Yuuri’s best friend, even if he’s not sure he plays that role for Phichit—but since Yuuri’s return from Sapporo, they’ve started spending a lot more time together. On Sunday mornings they go out for brunch, and Phichit is patiently teaching Yuuri how to cook a few Thai dishes. Yuuri has even taken Phichit to the pole dancing studio. “This is fantastic,” Phichit said, on his first visit, while suspended from the top of the pole. “Why haven’t you invited me before?”

“I thought you wouldn’t like it.”

Upside-down Phichit made a face that Yuuri interpreted as _Yuuri, never trust your own instincts about what people will like,_ and now he comes along whenever Yuuri drops in for a workout. 

“Play that video with Karev where he’s talking to his partner again,” he says, after considering the video selection. Phichit presses play on a shaky fancam from the Kiss and Cry, where Pavel Karev is saying something in Russian to Svetlana Chernetskaya. “Maybe? It could be, I guess. Maybe him?”

“That’s good, because rumour says Barakov might be dating his partner,” Phichit says. 

“Gossip is wrong a lot,” Yuuri objects. “And I hadn’t heard that about Barakov.”

Phichit waves this away. “You never hear any gossip, Yuuri. Does that mean you hope it’s Barakov?” 

“No,” he mutters. “I don’t … I don’t have a preference.” He doesn’t think about the posters on his wall. They don’t complain any more when he jerks off in the dark of his room, although he’s furtive in his glances at Victor’s exposed back. He wants to think about Poodle while he’s doing it, but also he doesn’t; it feels wrong and right all at once. It’s complicated, probably too complicated for what it is. Yuuri’s never been good at casual sex and now apparently he’s not good at casual masturbation, either. 

“You know, he doesn’t really talk like I think a pairs skater would,” Phichit says, thoughtful. “He never mentions skating with someone. Don’t you think he would talk about Svetlana or Alyona, if it was one of them?”

“It’s not Victor, Phichit. We’ve talked about this.” 

“But _why_ are you so sure it’s not Victor? Forget about the voice for a minute.”

Because Victor is Victor: a dream out of reach, a fantasy world that would never open its borders to someone like him. Because it would take something amazing—the quad axel, maybe—to pull Victor’s eyes towards him. Because Poodle compliments his butt and his step sequences and says things like _I like the way you wear your hair when you skate_ and, and, and, the list of things that Victor Nikiforov would not say to Katsuki Yuuri never ends. Sure, at first Yuuri had wanted to believe, but _I saw you skate at Rostelecom_ , even more than the voice, had squashed that hope. “I’ve been watching him all my life,” he says, after a minute, when he sees that Phichit really wants to know. “I just don't believe he’s watching me, too.”

There’s no opportunity to gain any information during the European Championships—both pairs skaters are skating in the same flight, and most skaters hand their phones off to coaches prior to warm-up—but it turns out not to matter, because Yuuri gets a text the day after the short program that says _Had my phone taken away all day yesterday, sorry! Apparently I’ve been texting too much and I’m not allowed to look at it on days when I have to skate anymore, coach’s orders 😭_.

Victor wins gold at the European Championships the next day, skating a beautiful rendition of Stammi Vicino and earning a new world record in the free skate. Pavel Karev and Svetlana Chernetskaya take gold in pairs; Konstantin Barakov and Alyona Sotskova take the bronze. _Congratulations on the European Championships!_ Yuuri texts, and feels like he’s swallowed a cup of boiling water. 

_It’ll be your turn at 4 Continents! Can’t wait to see that quad salchow Yuuri_ 🥰

By early February, Yuuri is landing the quad salchow regularly, regularly enough that Celestino agrees to put it in his programs for Four Continents, although he won’t let Yuuri put it in the back half like Poodle suggests. For the first time Yuuri can remember, he feels in control of his programs, as if he, not luck, will be the one to decide how they go. 

“How are you feeling about this one?” Mari asks, when she calls the night before he and Phichit fly out to Taiwan.

“Good,” Yuuri says, tentative, trying out the sound of it. “I think … I think this one’s going to be good?”

###

_(Replay footage of Jean-Jacques Leroy’s free skate at the Four Continents Figure Skating Championships in Taipei, Taiwan, and then a shot of him giving his signature “JJ” hand sign in the Kiss and Cry.)_

Morooka Hisashi _(voiceover)_ : … won gold, with Katsuki Yuuri not far behind in grabbing silver. Katsuki successfully landed a quad salchow in his free skate, a jump we hadn’t previously seen in his repertoire. _(The footage shifts to the medal ceremony.)_ They were joined on the podium by Seung-gil Lee, who once again landed his trademark quad loop …

###

**Taipei, Taiwan  
February 21, 2016**

“You’re not going to strip again if you drink that, are you?” JJ asks, sneering, when Yuuri orders a glass of kaoliang while they’re out for lamb hotpot after the exhibition skate. 

“What?” Yuuri says, at the same time as Phichit says “ _What_?!?”

“You know,” JJ says, waving a hand at Yuuri. He’s wearing his gold medal, which is obviously ridiculous, but he’d flashed it at the waiter when they arrived and somehow _no tables_ had turned into _a table for four, right this way sir_. “The stripping thing. It’s a drunk thing, right? You do it when you drink?”

“Are you … are you talking about the banquet? In Sochi?” Phichit manages, when he sees that Yuuri has temporarily lost the power of speech. Leo, who had been chatting with Phichit about who will be competitive at Worlds—“yeah, but Otabek Altin skipped this so he’d be fresh for Worlds, don’t forget about him”—is now pretending to be engrossed in the hotpot, but Yuuri can see how wide his eyes are. 

“Obviously? He was totally wild. If I hadn’t seen it I wouldn’t have believed it.” JJ turns to Yuuri. “You always seemed like such a shy kid, you know?” 

Yuuri would object to “kid,” considering that he’s four years older than JJ, but, again: his tongue is not working right now. 

“Okay, you have to tell me what happened,” Phichit says. “Do you have pictures? If you have pictures, you have to show me.”

“Why would I want photos of him pole-dancing?” JJ objects, and Yuuri expires. Cause of death: utter, total embarrassment. It’s not the worst timing, he thinks, numb: here he is, eating lamb hotpot in Taipei, the night after winning silver at the Four Continents, after getting a text from Poodle that said _that was fantastic Yuuri, I’m so proud of you_ and one from Tiger that said _since when can you do a fucking quad salchow Katsudon_. He’d cried in a bathroom stall again, but this time from happiness. It’s nice to think he got to have all that, before the end. 

“Yeah, okay, but …” Phichit pats Yuuri on the knee, _trust me, trust me_. “Who was he dancing with? Tell me more.” 

“How would I know?” JJ says. “Oh! Wait, he had a dance-off with that Russian kid. You know who I mean? The one who thinks animal print is cool.”

“Yuri Plisetsky?” 

“That other kid is named Yuri too? I guess that’ll make it easier to remember the names of all the people I’m going to beat next season.” 

Leo and Phichit manage a synchronized eye roll at that. None of them had wanted to invite JJ to come out tonight, but when JJ overheard Seung-gil refusing Phichit’s invitation, they hadn’t exactly been able to claim that they wanted to keep the group small. (Also Yuuri felt a little bad—just a little—because when JJ took the ice for his free skate all he could think was _ass flatter than blinchiki_ , which isn’t even true, and he didn’t want to compound bad thoughts with rudeness.) 

“Anyone else?” Phichit presses. “That he was dancing with. Or hanging out with, that’s good too.” 

“Why don’t you just ask him?” JJ says, and Yuuri kicks Phichit’s calf under the table, trying to silently warn him not to say _he doesn’t remember_ because then it will get around—Leo is good friends with Chelsea and Mark Owens, one of the American pairs team, and if he tells them word will spread through the pairs skating community that _Yuuri doesn’t remember the banquet_. 

“He won’t tell me,” Phichit says, faux-pouty, kicking right back. Of course he already had a plan to deal with that, Yuuri thinks. Phichit’s good at this sort of thing. “His own roommate! His best friend!”

JJ shrugs. “I told you, I don’t know. I left early because I don’t like hanging around with losers, you know? I mean, whatever”—he waves at Phichit (fourth) and Leo (sixth)—“present company excepted, I guess.” 

Which, as a declaration, brings the discussion of the banquet to a halt, and kind of puts a bit of a damper on the hotpot.

###

**Detroit, Michigan  
March 2016**

Late nights. Winter, tipping over into spring. 

His relationship with Poodle is like a house, Yuuri thinks, as he walks home from another quiet night skate. A house of many stories, lots of rooms; long hallways and longer staircases, and walls that slide and change the layout when he’s not looking. A house built from the bond that Poodle thinks they have—that they _do_ have, even if Yuuri can’t put a face to the person who fills him with a nameless yearning. (He doesn’t want to put a name to it, not when there’s no name to put to Poodle.) 

Sometimes, when Yuuri imagines looking out the windows in the house, he sees St. Petersburg, and sometimes Detroit and sometimes Hasetsu. He wanders from room to room, finding notes that someone’s left behind, or finding that Poodle’s left the light on in the rooms where he thinks Yuuri might want to go. They’re playing a game of hide-and-seek, only with the rules adapted: he loses if he lets Poodle know that he’s looking. It makes Yuuri cautious, knowing that, more cautious than he wants to be; he never gets to ask all the questions he wants to, the questions he would ask if there were no secrets between them. 

Worlds is at the end of the month. He’ll know by the end of the month. 

He has to believe that, because the only other ending he can imagine is the walls of the house imploding around him.

###

Yuuri tries the quad axel for the first time on the third day of March, just past midnight. He sprawls on the ice afterwards, a bruise growing on one hip like a badge, blinking up at the lightning arc of lights overhead. He’d known there would be falls before he landed it: this is just the first one. 

After a minute, Yuuri rescues his phone from the boards and snaps a selfie, to commemorate the moment. _Quad axel fall count: 1_ , he texts, and Poodle just sends a laughing emoji. 

He and Poodle had agreed, a few weeks ago, that Worlds was too early to aim to land the quad axel in competition. Now that he’s begun, Yuuri can admit that this is a longer-term project; he’ll have the entire off-season to focus on it, refine the jump. He can choreograph a free skate around it, one where there’s a long, clear entry into the axel, so that when he’s ready he can switch it from a triple to a quad. For now, the goal is to gain consistency in all his jumps, and overcome some of the blocks he’s had in the past.

 **Poodle**  
ok, for the quad flip 11:20 PM  
what’s different when you land it and when you don’t? 11:20 PM  
or for any jump I guess, why are you so inconsistent? 11:21 PM

Yuuri thinks about this while running through his choreographic sequence. In Sochi, when he’d fallen, he’d been thinking about Vicchan: his tongue sticking out, like a pink button slotted between his teeth; the weight of him, shivering in Yuuri’s arms as a puppy. Right before the quad toe loop, Yuuri had taken a deep breath and smelled damp dog, the sand and dry seaweed on the beach in Hasetsu; momentarily, instead of his music, there had been the sound of black-tailed gulls mixing with excited barks. No wonder he crashed, Yuuri thinks, arching his leg into a Biellmann. His mind had been so far away. 

And then there was the competition—Rostelecom, 2014, the one where Poodle first noticed him—right after he had sex for the first time. It had been with a guy from his biomechanics class, Alex; it had been fumbling and awkward and Yuuri had spent the five days in Russia frantically trying to decide if he wanted to do it with Alex again and if he didn’t (he didn’t), how he could let Alex down gently. Yuuri had fallen every time he thought about it, which was a lot. 

(When he came back from Russia, Alex had said “Do you want to come to movie night at the Student Center?” and Yuuri replied, “I don’t really do that sort of thing?” 

“ … Movies? You don’t do movies?”

“Yeah. I … uh. I don’t like them?”

The whole rest of the term in biomechanics had been horribly awkward.)

 _I think … when there’s something on my mind, a problem I can’t solve, I tend to flub my jumps_ , he texts, after he finishes skating the sequence. _In Sochi, after my dog died, I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I brought it on the ice with me._

 **Poodle**  
you’ll have to learn to clear your mind I guess? 11:30 PM  
you’ll need it empty for the axel 11:31 PM

Remembering All-Japan, where the thought of the quad axel and Poodle’s _I believe in you_ had pressed aside all the churning worry about falling apart during another free skate, he texts back: _it doesn’t have to be empty, exactly—maybe just focused on good thoughts?_

 _Easy, then! We just need to find something nice for you to think about Yuuri_ 😉 

March moves onward, and the quad axel fall count goes up. Three. Five. Eight. Eleven. 

“How many times did you try before you landed your first quad flip?” Yuuri asks Stammi Vicino Promotional Poster Victor. “Ten? Fifteen?”

 _Once_ , the poster says, matter-of-fact, and Yuuri remembers now that he’d read this in an interview in _It Figures_ last year: _I landed it on my first try, and after a month of practice it was consistent enough to do in competition._

 _A quad flip isn’t a quad axel_ , Casual Rinkside Victor says, although he refrains from mentioning that Yuuri didn’t land a quad flip cleanly until his twentieth attempt. _You don’t see me trying that, do you?_

“Maybe you are,” Yuuri says. “Maybe Victor Nikiforov is already landing the quad axel thirty percent of the time in practice. Maybe he’s going to try it at Worlds. How would I know?” 

The posters keep their counsel on that, but Poodle says _you’ll get there, Yuuri, it’s just a matter of time_ when he complains about things moving slowly. He shrugs it off, keeps skating.

###

**Detroit, Michigan  
March 24, 2016**

Three days out from the flight to Tokyo, Yuuri lies sleepless on his bed and wishes he was at the rink. He knows the value of tapering too well to push it, though; besides, he woke yesterday to a message from Poodle that said _you’d better not be at the rink tonight Yuuri, I want you rested in Tokyo!_ and after that Yuuri spent half the day trying to decide if there was a double meaning there, if Poodle thought they would … well, if they would be doing something other than skating, in Tokyo. And then he spent the afternoon trying not to think about how much he wanted Poodle to want that, because that’s the sort of thought he’s not allowed to have. He’s not allowed to want things from Poodle, not yet, even though wanting things is kind of the only thing that makes this all okay. It’s confusing. He tries not to think about it, most of the time.

Worlds are three days away. In three days, he’ll know.

 **Katsuki Yuuri**  
can’t sleep 11:12 PM  
not used to going to bed this early anymore 11:12 PM

 _What are you thinking about_ , Poodle replies, almost instantly. Like he’s just in the next room. If Yuuri tiptoes in, keeps quiet enough, maybe Poodle will still be there when Yuuri arrives. 

_The legacy thing_ , he says. It’s true; ever since Poodle brought it up, Yuuri has thought about it in spare moments: what legacy means, what he wants people to remember about him. What he might want them to remember if the quad axel doesn’t go as planned. (It’s also something he can ask about that doesn’t give him away. A stealthy question, like moving in sock feet.) _I hadn’t really thought about it before this year but now I can’t stop. Do you think about that a lot? Your legacy, I mean._

 **Poodle**  
I used to, all the time 11:15 PM  
but this year I realized that I’ve neglected a lot of other things because of it 11:15 PM  
a lot of other L words 11:16 PM  
and now I think about how I want to make my mark on someone, instead, so that I’m alive in someone’s heart and not just on the ice 11:16 PM

A jet trail of shame shoots through Yuuri’s stomach. This is bad, he thinks. So bad. I can’t—

 **Poodle**  
I really want to be in the same place as you again Yuuri 11:16 PM

He types _me too_ and then deletes it and types it again and deletes it and his texting thumb is shaking on the keyboard. Finally, when the moment feels like it can’t go on any longer, he types it. Sends it.

###

When Yuuri turns on the lights, the ice flashes like lightning, leaves a glowing after-image beneath his eyelids, the same way his phone does when he blinks at it in the dark. He shouldn’t be here, past midnight and shivering, he knows that. And yet here he is. 

He really shouldn’t be attempting quad axels, and yet here he is. One fall. Two. 

Yuuri picks himself up and dusts off the damp, right knee stinging. He should stop. 

He lines up for a third attempt, his mind an endless loop of recrimination. Even if Poodle never finds out, if they meet in Tokyo and there’s no problem—if, if, if—Yuuri will still have to reckon with the fact that he let Poodle believe something that wasn’t true just to spare his own feelings. It’s the same thing he’s always done, with his family and Vicchan and _everyone_ in his life. 

As soon as he takes off, Yuuri knows it’s going to end badly. He’s off-angle, the ice rushing up at him too fast, like a cold fist to the face. 

He closes his eyes, and falls.

###

_(Footage of an interview scrum outside the Detroit Skating Club, reporters surrounding Celestino Cialdini. He looks tired and harried.)_

**Celestino Cialdini** : … damage to his lateral collateral ligament, the deltoid ligament in his right ankle, and his perineal tendon. He’ll be off the ice for at least six weeks. That’s really all we know right now. 

**Reporter** : So he won’t be going to Worlds?

 **Celestino Cialdini** : Yuuri will be flying to Tokyo to support his rinkmate, Phichit Chulanont, and then returning directly to his family home in Kyushu for a period of rehabilitation. 

**Reporter** : Can you tell us how was he injured? 

**Celestino Cialdini** : _(hesitating, irritated)_ I don’t know. 

**Reporter** : You weren’t there when he was injured?

 **Celestino Cialdini** : _(walking away)_ No more questions …

###

**Interlude: Tiger**

**St. Petersburg, Russia  
March 26, 2016**

Yuri finds Victor leaning against the boards at Sports Champions, haloed by a blast of late-afternoon sun from the long west windows. He would bet money that Victor picked the spot on purpose, timing his position to the sweep of the sunbeam around the rink. Victor always knows how to find a spotlight. 

“I won junior Worlds,” Yuri says, hip-checking Victor into the shadows. “No quads. You remember your promise, right?”

“Hmm?” Victor says, not looking up from his phone. Oh. He’s probably busy trying to comfort the Japanese piggy about his injury. Yesterday, when Yuri heard the news, he’d typed out and deleted four different texts to Katsudon, finally settling on _sorry you hurt yourself_. He’d received some total bullshit nonsense in return, which is what he gets for trying to be nice to someone while they’re high on painkillers. 

“I said, do you remember your promise? About choreographing a program for me for next year?”

Victor makes a confused face, which Yuri was expecting. Victor has two modes: off, where he forgets everything three minutes after he’s said it, or on, where he’s obsessively focused. On mode is restricted to Victor’s own skating and Katsudon. 

(During Four Continents Victor harassed everyone who trained at Sports Champions into coming over to his apartment to watch the Japanese piggy skate; he’d narrated Katsudon’s free skate and then complained that his PCS should have been higher. 

“He’s really gone on this Japanese boy, huh?” Svetlana Chernetskaya said, when she came into Victor’s kitchen to find Yuri silently judging the contents of a cheese platter. Too many cheeses he didn’t recognize. Pavel Karev, coming in behind her, laughed. 

“Can’t complain, though, if he’s going to get all his Yuuri-watching parties catered.”)

“Yurio,” Victor says, ignoring Yuri’s question. (Yuri grits his teeth and keeps quiet. He’s long since realized that nothing he says stops Victor from using the nickname.) “Do you … do you get the sense that Yuuri knows who you are? When you text him, I mean.” 

“I don’t text him,” Yuri says, automatically. And then, after a second: “Wait. What do you mean?”

Victor hesitates, uncertain. That’s weird, Yuri thinks. Victor’s entire thing is that he’s _always_ confident, never unsure of his welcome, never unsure of the results or his place on the podium or whether people want to be his friend or … whatever. Whatever. 

“I mean …” Victor shrugs, holds out his phone to Yuri.

The text exchange on the screen picks up in the middle of a conversation.

 **Vitya**  
maybe I know a physio in Detroit, let me check 3:51 PM

 **♥️♥️♥️ Yuuri ♥️♥️♥️**  
it’s fine I feel fine right now! nothing hurts 3:52 PM

 **Vitya**  
I think that’s the painkillers Yuuri 3:52 PM

 **♥️♥️♥️ Yuuri ♥️♥️♥️**  
anyway I’m going right back to Hasetsu after Tokyo so no Detroit physio 3:53 PM  
I’ll just soak in the hot springs for 6 weeks no problem right 3:53 PM  
not a problem that I’ll be 24 this year and probably everyone is thinking this is the end of my competitive skating career 3:54 PM

(Self-pitying baby, Yuri thinks, reminded of Katsudon crying in the bathroom stall in Sochi. What a loser.)

 **Vitya**  
Yuuri …. 😳 no-one thinks that 3:54 PM

(Obviously everyone thinks that. Figure skating careers end every day over less than that, over a bad break-up or weight gain or inconvenient growth spurts. Fucking growth spurts.)

 **♥️♥️♥️ Yuuri ♥️♥️♥️**  
have you ever been injured like this? 3:56 PM  
this badly I mean, that you had to miss a big chunk of the season 3:57 PM

Yuri snaps a look up at Victor, understanding now. You don’t have to be a gross slobbering fanboy of Victor Nikiforov’s to know that Victor sat out almost the entire Grand Prix Series with an MCL injury in 2009. It’s part of the Victor Nikiforov legend, how he’d clawed his way back in time to win gold in Vancouver in 2010. And Katsudon _does_ know, Yuri remembers: he talked about it at the banquet, while Victor was draped over his sweaty shoulder, the two of them playing a lazy game of strip rock-paper-scissors in the corner of the ballroom. Katsudon had come into the game half-undressed, at a disadvantage, but then he won three times in a row, took off Victor’s jacket and tie and belt. 

“You don’t know how to lose, Victor,” he said, flushed bright red, horrid striped tie flopping in his face. “You haven’t really lost anything since Trophee Eric Brompard in 2009, and even then you only lost because you were injured. You think you can handle another loss here?”

“Uh,” Yuri says, to Victor, because he can’t think of what else to say. 

“After Sochi,” Victor says, snatching his phone back. He turns into the tail-end of the shadow, so that Yuri can’t quite see his face. “The first time he texted me. He said _who is this_ and I thought he was joking. You know, because …” he trails off, and Yuri remembers this, too: Victor whining “Everyone knows who I am! Why can’t I ever be the person who pays for his falafel in peace?” after the guy at the street food stall insisted they take their pitas for free, and then Katsudon laughing and saying, “Who are you? Victor Nikiforov? Never heard of him. Are you famous or something?” 

“No, I’m a nobody,” Victor agreed. They were holding hands, by that point in the evening. “Would you still like me if I was a nobody, Yuuri?”

“I’d like you no matter who you were!” 

“You two are gross,” Yuri said, around a mouthful of falafel. “I’m going back to the hotel.” 

He didn’t, though. He kept walking with them, spiralling through the dark of midnight Sochi, listening as they traded sentimental bullshit: “I named my dog after you,” Katsudon admitted, flopping down on the edge of an empty marble fountain. The sound of December wind through the palms mimicked the fall of water, a quiet susurration. Yuri sat down on the marble edge, almost froze his ass off in an instant, and leapt back up. “I called him Vicchan, you know that?” Katsudon continued, burrowing his head into Victor’s shoulder. “And he was a poodle, too, just like Makka. Is that embarrassing? Are you embarrassed for me, Victor? I can only tell you this because I’m drunk, you know.” 

Victor giggled. (Giggled.) “I’ll be your poodle, Yuuri. Here, give me your phone”—Victor pawed at Katsudon’s coat, pulled out a phone—“see, see? I’ll be Poodle. You can call me Vicchan, too, if you want.”

“What about him?” Katsudon said, jerking a thumb at Yuri. “He needs a nickname.”

“Didn’t we already agree on Yurio?”

“Yeah but we need an _animal!_ He’s … what sort of animal is he?” 

Yuri shakes off the memory—he’d interceded, furiously tapping in _Tiger_ before one of them could put _Kitten_ in Katsudon’s contact list—and frowns at Victor, who is now mumbling to himself. “Maybe he thought I was talking about the dog? Oh. Maybe he thought I was talking about his _dead_ dog …”

“It’s just the painkillers,” Yuri suggests, pretending he believes it. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying. Look”—he digs his own phone out of his pocket—“look what he said to me yesterday.”

 **Katsudon**  
you’re like a little cat aren’t you 9:48 PM  
like a baby kitten! 9:48 PM  
wait kittens ARE babies 9:49 PM  
anyway sometimes you claw and sometimes you purr 9:49 PM  
here kitty kitty kitty 9:50 PM

“Yes,” Victor says, nodding. “He obviously knows who _you_ are.”

“Shut up! I showed you this to make you feel better, asshole.” The sunbeam has shifted, following Victor again, and in the golden wash he looks sad. A trick of the light, of course. Victor Nikiforov doesn’t do sad. “Anyway, he’s said your name, right. Or talked about your skating.”

Yuri can see the answer in the slight drop of Victor’s chin. “But who _else_ would he think you are?” he says, exasperated. 

Victor glances around the rink, which is busy, this time of day, with various Russian skaters. Pairs teams and ice dancers and Mila Babicheva in her usual ridiculous crop top. “Anyone,” Victor says. “Maybe I could be anyone at all.”

###

**Tokyo, Japan  
March 27, 2016**

The hotel room in Tokyo is just another hotel room, too, except that Phichit’s stuff is spread out on the bed next to Yuuri’s, and there’s a set of crutches leaning against the headboard. That, and he’s not here to skate. Six weeks, the doctors said, six weeks before he can even think about putting a foot back on the ice, and that will just be the start. 

There’s a knock at the door, interrupting his self-pity fest. “Yuuri?” 

Yuuri would know that voice anywhere. He resists the urge to shift into fourth position; he couldn’t do it right now, anyway. 

“Sorry, I’m coming, it’ll just take a minute.” He swings off the bed and hops with the crutches over to the door, opening it to find Minako in a long tan trench coat, arms crossed, shoulders back. She always has perfect posture. 

“You didn’t need to come, Minako-sensei,” he says. “You know I’m not skating.” Mari had planned to come, too, until he’d called and told her, during those first, blurry hours after the fall, that he wouldn’t be skating in Tokyo anymore. And then called again, at Celestino’s urging, to ask if it would be alright if he came back to Hasetsu for a while. 

“Are you kidding? This is a once in a lifetime opportunity!” Minako says, pushing past him and sitting down on the armchair in one corner. “You can get me the room numbers for all the hot skaters.”

Yuuri scrunches up his nose at this. “So you didn’t want to see me at all, then! You’re just using me for my connections!”

“No, no, of course I’m here to support you! And to watch skating! Do you think Christophe Giacometti is staying in this hotel?” 

He shuffles back over to his bed, the soft rubber of the crutches insufficient cover for the hard wood beneath. His armpits are scraped raw already. Minako, attuned to the little tells of a body in pain, frowns. “That bad, huh?” 

Yuuri shrugs. 

“What happened?”

“A bad landing.” That’s what he told Celestino, too; his coach had yelled at him, for the first time in their five years together, after he learned that Yuuri had been skating after hours. Not just that—skating _alone_. He hadn’t told Celestino what he’d been trying to land, though. 

Everything before arriving in the hospital room the night of the fall is a bit of a blur: somehow, he’d managed to slide to the rink side and call Phichit, and then Phichit had arrived to find Yuuri lying on the ice, the pain bad enough that most of what Yuuri could hear was a high, muffled buzz, his body shrieking at him. The next two days had been erased by a cocktail of painkillers and shame, and somewhere in there, Celestino had suggested he go home. 

“Where?” Yuuri had asked, confused. 

“To Hasetsu. You’re going to need people to look after you, for a while. And we’re already flying to Tokyo, anyway.” 

There hadn’t seemed like there was any reason to object. His directed study is done, and he can’t skate for a while. It’s a good opportunity to see everyone, after five years away. 

He hates it, though. It feels like he’s coming home a failure. 

As if she can read his mind, Minako says, softly, “It’ll be nice to have you home. Everyone’s really looking forward to it. I mean, not that anyone’s happy about the circumstances … once you’re off the crutches, you can come to the studio and do flexibility work.” 

He can’t meet her eyes. “Yeah. That sounds good.” 

“Anyway,” she says. Too perceptive. “I just wanted to come and say hi. You’ll sit with me to watch the skating?” 

“Sure. Yeah.” He hasn’t really thought about watching, but of course, he’ll be watching, not just the men’s skates but probably the pairs’ too. Probably. He hasn’t heard anything from Poodle since he arrived, but they were both in the air, today. 

After Minako leaves—“I’m going to go find a drink”—Yuuri lies around on the bed for a bit and watches as Phichit’s feed lights up with selfies: the soft flutter of cherry blossoms, the top of Tokyo Skytree, Sensoji Temple. Phichit had been angry, too, when Yuuri had come home with his crutches: _Why didn’t you tell me you were skating late? I would have made sure you weren’t pushing too hard. Why did it have to be a secret?_

Yuuri didn’t answer him, because there was no good answer. 

By the time they’d boarded the plane this morning, Phichit had softened, although Yuuri isn’t sure if he’s really been forgiven or if Phichit has just decided to focus on Worlds. He’d invited Yuuri out to tour Tokyo after they arrived, like a peace offering. 

“My leg, though … I’d just slow you down.”

“Do you want me to stay here? So I can be there when you meet Poodle.” 

“It’s probably better if it’s private.” 

Phichit had looked as if he wanted to argue about that, but he’d gone out, anyway.

 **Poodle**  
Yuuri! You must be here by now, yes? Where are you? 7:37 PM

Yuuri can’t shake off the low-level feeling of dread that comes with the text, like he’s somehow going to fall again, and take the entire paper tower of his relationship with Poodle down with him. There’s no avoiding it, though. He’s avoided so much for so long. _In my room_ , he says. _At the hotel._

_I’m at the hotel bar! They’ve got a heated outdoor patio with a great view of the city. Can you come up?_

_Sure_ , he replies, already making his careful way towards the bathroom. He needs to brush his teeth and comb the jet lag from his hair and probably put on a better shirt. Phichit had recommended that Yuuri wear his blue cardigan and jeans, but the jeans are too painful to drag on, so his track pants will have to do. _Just give me a few minutes._

_Okay but I want a hug when you get here, Yuuri. It’s been too long! Promise you’ll give me a hug as soon as you see me?_

The answer comes easily; a hug will be a good way to hide his reaction to finally having a name and a face. _Promise_. 

As the elevator rises towards the rooftop bar, it lifts Yuuri’s heart up into his throat. The crutches under his armpits are damp with sweat already, the blue cardigan clinging to his back. 

(“Who do you want it to be?” Phichit had asked, before he left. 

“I … I don’t know. I just want to know who he is, really.”)

“A seat for one, or are you joining a party?” the hostess asks. Yuuri scans the room: a grand piano, the hot liquid gold of backlit bottles behind the bar, round brass chandeliers hanging over the room like a dozen full moons rising. He doesn’t recognize anyone inside, but beyond the glass wall blocking off the patio he can see another two dozen people in a forest of square white umbrellas and bronze heat lamps. They’re all too far away to make out faces.

“I’m just meeting a friend on the patio,” he says, and she waves him over towards the door. 

It takes a thousand years to cross the bar to the automatic sliding door. He pauses in front of it, eyes closed, while it slides open and shut, open and shut, in time with the twitch of a muscle in his jaw. _Please please please …_ He doesn’t know what—or who—he’s pleading for.

He steps through. Opens his eyes, and freezes. The entire Russian figure skating team is on the patio. 

There’s Konstantin Barakov, feet up on a chair, laughing as he downs a drink. There, only a few metres from Yuuri, is Pavel Karev, sitting on the edge of a potted plant, tilting forward at a dangerous angle to talk to someone sitting in the leafy shadows. And there—there’s Victor, at the far side of the patio, leaning back against the railing and listening absently to something Georgi Popovich is saying. Victor is wearing what looks like a black silk button-up, open over a white t-shirt. He has his head tilted back, baring his throat to the knife-edge of the moon. 

Nobody is looking at Yuuri, not yet. He pulls out his phone: if he sends a text now, he can watch to see who reacts. Phichit would be proud of that idea. Maybe it’s weird, to send _I’m here now_ , but he can play it off like he’s shy, he can—

“Yuuri?” When he glances up from the half-written text, he finds Pavel Karev leaning around the potted plant, grinning. “Is that _the_ Katsuki Yuuri?”

He says it like it’s a funny joke. Probably it is, Yuuri thinks. Probably he’ll have to figure out Poodle’s—Pavel’s? maybe he’d been making a play on the similar sounds?—sense of humour in person, all over again. People are never quite the same on text as they are in reality. He certainly isn’t, but now at least he can be himself without having to worry about tripping into one of the treacherous pits dug by all the things he doesn’t know.

“Hey,” he says, softly, and stumbles across the patio. A hug. Right. Is he disappointed? Is that what he’s feeling? “Good to see you,” he says, and tries to figure out where to put his crutches and how to manage a hug one-legged and also maybe one-armed because he’s still holding his phone, and in the end Yuuri just kind of squishes himself against the other man. One of the crutches is trapped between them and Yuuri puts a hand on Pavel’s shoulder and, uh … how do people hug? Do they—okay, maybe just pat his shoulder a bit, that’s good … 

It’s only when Yuuri finally pulls back that he sees how wide the other man’s eyes are, how stiff he is. “Uhh. Okay. Yes. You like hugs? I, uh”—Pavel laughs, uncomfortable, and cuts a glance over towards the back of the patio, as if looking for someone’s reaction—“that’s cool?”

Yuuri doesn’t have time for more than _oh no_ , the sharp vertiginous drop of his stomach, before his phone buzzes.

 **Poodle**  
you don’t know who I am, do you? 8:15 PM

###

_(A shot of the podium at Yoyogi National Gymnasium, with Christophe Giacometti in top spot, followed by Victor Nikiforov with silver and Otabek Altin with bronze. Nikiforov is not smiling; Giacometti is looking down at him with a worried expression.)_

Morooka Hisashi _(voiceover)_ : A surprising result at the World Figure Skating Championships, as commentators had expected Nikiforov to continue his winning streak, following on top performances at the Grand Prix Final and the European Championships. His skating lacked some of its usual lustre, though, and that was enough for Giacometti, a long-time friend and rival of Nikiforov’s, to squeak onto the top spot on the podium …


	4. Third Rotation

> _… at his home in St. Petersburg in early spring, just when the ice clogging the Neva begins to thaw and the Winter Palace loses its white crown._
> 
> _Nikiforov directed me to a a small, cheerful Japanese restaurant a stone’s throw from the Admiralty. When I arrived, I found him sitting near the front window, famous silver locks silhouetted against a spectacular view of the golden dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral. “I discovered this place earlier this year,” he said. “I come here a lot.”_
> 
> _After we ordered, I turned to the topic of his surprise silver at the World Championships._
> 
> _“Was it a surprise?” he said, frowning. “I suppose that’s good. I’m always looking for new ways to surprise people.” Beyond that, however, he refused to say anything more about Worlds, other than to rebut the rumours that he was injured in some way. “No. I was fine. Physically, I was fine …”_
> 
> _It Figures Magazine_ , May/June 2016 issue, “Victor Nikiforov: What’s Next for the Living Legend”

###

**Tokyo to Fukuoka Shinkansen  
April 4, 2016**

“Yuuri?” Minako’s voice slices through the hypnotic blur of the scenery.

“Hm?” He drags his eyes away from the window and over to the aisle seat. Minako had insisted they take the train down to Hasetsu, rather than jamming into economy seats on a plane, so that Yuuri would have a few extra inches of room to stretch out his leg. Remembering the tearing ache of the flight from Detroit, he hadn’t objected. 

“You haven’t said anything for the last, oh …” she checks her watch. “Three hours. Are you alright?”

“I …” Is he alright? There are a thousand different ways he could answer that, and all of them mean _no_. “My leg’s a bit sore.” 

She nods, brisk. “We’ll be at Hakata Station soon. It’ll help to move around.”

Maybe for the leg, Yuuri thinks. Moving around won’t do much for the other parts of him that hurt. “Yeah.” 

Out the window, the coastal towns spin by at speeds that are hard for the eye to hold. Yuuri takes off his glasses and lets the view soften into a long green smear of oil paint, splashed with grey and distant blue; an abstract. Against it, the memory of that first night in Tokyo stands out in woodcut definition, all the details he can’t forget inked in stark black against the passing landscape.

First, there was the message, the beginning of the end: _you don’t know who I am, do you?_

And then, when Yuuri looked up, there was Victor Nikiforov, staring at him from across the patio, an expression on his face like someone had just knifed him under the ribs. There was Victor’s voice—soft and dangerous and angry and something else, something that Yuuri couldn’t bear to think of as _sad_ —saying, “Hello, Yuuri.” 

The other skaters on the patio were gawking at him. Pavel Karev was trying to scramble away, distance himself from Yuuri. They know, Yuuri thought. They know. There didn’t seem to be anything he could do, other than run away; except that he couldn’t run, really, and so he turned and stumbled away, an escape in slow motion. 

No-one came after him. He would have been so easy to catch, if anyone wanted to. 

In the lobby—he ended up in the hotel lobby, a direct consequence of flailing for the elevator button labelled _take me as far away as possible_ —he found Phichit, waiting to go up. 

“Yuuri? What’s wrong?” 

He held out his phone, wordless. _You don’t know who I am, do you?_

“Oh shit. Shit, I knew I should have stayed here … do you know who it is now?” A nod. “Did you apologize? Explain?”

“I … no. I ran away. I hopped away, whatever—”

“Oh _shit_. What were you thinking?”

“I didn’t know what else to do! I—Phichit, it’s Victor. It’s _Victor Nikiforov_.” It still didn’t make sense. (Yuuri, remembering, thinks it may _never_ make sense. He had been so certain it wasn’t Victor. Why him? Why would Victor Nikiforov pay attention to _him?_ )

“Breathe, Yuuri.” The elevator let out an angry beep, and Phichit slid in before the doors could close. “You obviously have to apologize. That’s the first thing. Let’s go back up—where is he?”

“Rooftop bar,” Yuuri managed. All of the cells in his body felt like they were vibrating off in different directions. _Victor Nikiforov_. He’d fallen in—something, some feeling, no _names_ —with _Victor Nikiforov_. And then he had _run away_ from Victor Nikiforov. 

Phichit jabbed the button for the top floor. “It’s fine. He just needs to know that you wanted it to be him this whole time, okay?”

“Did I?” 

“Obviously,” Phichit said, as the elevator began its smooth upward progress. On the mirrored wall, Yuuri was red-faced, eyes wild. The crutches were the only thing keeping him upright. “Didn’t you know that?” 

“I—yes, but I thought it wasn’t him. I didn’t think it was him?”

“Yeah, I know.”

When the doors opened with a ping, Victor was standing there, as if he was waiting for Yuuri, and not just for the elevator. His phone was in one hand; the case, peeking out, had a drawing of a poodle on it. Of course. Of course, a poodle. 

“Come on,” Phichit hissed, when Yuuri didn’t move. He grabbed an arm and dragged Yuuri out of the elevator with him. “Hi! Victor, right? Good to see you. Yuuri here has something he wants to say.” 

“I’m sorry,” Yuuri said. Gasped. Victor’s face was entirely blank, the absence of expression so strong it could have battled with a black hole and won. “I’m sorry. I just … Can I explain?”

“I’m a bit busy, Yuuri,” Victor said, not meeting his eyes. It was strange, so strange, to hear his name in Victor’s Russian accent, in a voice familiar from years of watching interviews. “You know I have to skate, yes? That I’m not just available whenever you want more skating tips from your convenient mystery friend?” 

“I didn’t—I didn’t think it was you.” The knot in his stomach was tangled beyond untying; if it was a bootlace, Yuuri thought, it would have to be cut. “I never would have … I mean, if I’d thought it was you I never would have done that—asked you for advice, I mean, or—I couldn’t—”

“Well. We both thought a lot of things, I guess.” As Victor stepped past them, into the elevator, Yuuri could smell him: cedar smoke and stone fruit and the mundane sweetness of fabric softener. He wanted, almost frantic with it, to put a hand on Victor’s shoulder and say _I was picturing you. I’ve been dreaming of you for years._ He didn’t move, and Victor didn’t turn around. “I didn’t think you were the type to be so selfish, Yuuri, but I guess I was wrong, too.”

Outside the train window, the sea flashes between houses, a turquoise eye blinking open and closed. 

“You want something to eat?” Minako asks, and Yuuri shakes his head. She knows something is wrong—something more than just the constant throbbing pain in his leg—but she hasn’t asked. She didn’t ask when she came to his room, the night of the men’s short skate, and found Yuuri huddled under the blankets. She didn’t ask when he laughed, hysterical, at the text Tiger sent after Victor’s short program, after Victor received his lowest score in four years: _what the fuck did you do to Victor, Katsudon?_ Of course. Of course he would get a name as soon as it was too fucking late. 

And then there had been Victor’s free skate, where Victor had _fallen_ on his quad flip, and Minako _had_ asked: “Are you alright?”

The answer had still been _no_. Yuuri had gone to the bathroom, afterwards, and vomited up his supper. He, Katsuki Yuuri, was the colossal asshole who had fucked up Victor Nikiforov’s run at a fifth World title, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. 

During the medal ceremony Phichit had muttered, “Maybe he just needs some time,” while they watched Victor waving rigidly to the audience. (Phichit had come in seventh. He was pleased with it, said it was something to build on for next year, a step he could climb on his way to the top.) “He was probably embarrassed, Yuuri. Right? But once some time passes …” 

Time can heal a tear to your collateral lateral ligament and your deltoid ligament and your perineal tendon but Yuuri doesn’t think time can cure Victor of hating him. Every time Yuuri had passed someone from the Russian team in the hotel or at the rink, they had looked the other way. The one time he’d seen Victor, in the lobby, Victor had turned on his heel and walked in the other direction. 

When his phone buzzes, Yuuri almost falls out of his seat in an attempt to pull it out of his bag. If it’s Victor—

 **Tiger**  
hey 4:18 PM  
hey loser 4:18 PM  
you’re an asshole you know that? 4:19 PM

 **Katsuki Yuuri**  
yeah 4:20 PM  
I know 4:20 PM

 **Tiger**  
in case you didn’t already know this is Yuri Plisetsky 4:21 PM

(This is not a surprise, not really; Yuuri had guessed that much as soon as JJ described the dance-off.)

if you come back to skate this year I’m going to beat you at every single fucking competition 4:21 PM  
because you’re an asshole 4:21 PM  
and a loser 4:22 PM

 **Katsuki Yuuri**  
I know 4:22 PM

“Minako-sensei?” He shuts off his phone. There’s nothing waiting there for him anymore. 

“Yes?”

“I’m going to sleep, okay?”

“Sure. I’ll wake you at Hakata.”

###

**Hasetsu, Kyushu  
April 2016**

Hasetsu welcomes Yuuri back with an unseasonable snowstorm, a flurry of white that looks like a fall of frozen cherry blossoms. 

“I’d ask you to shovel the entry,” his mother says, when he limps downstairs for breakfast in the morning, “but I guess you can’t really do that, can you, dear?” 

“No. Sorry, Mom.” The snow cups the onsen like a gentle, muffling hand, quieting the outside world. Yuuri makes his way to the small shrine for Vicchan, and tries to find the words to tell a photograph that he wishes there had been a chance to see him again, before the end. 

Mari finds him there, trying and failing to bend down low enough to light the incense by the photograph. “Hey. Sorry I missed you when you came in last night.” 

“That’s okay. I just went right to bed.” It had been strange to wake in his childhood bedroom again, after five years away, and strange to see the posters of Victor—some of the same ones he has in Detroit, although five years out of date—crowding the walls. Yuuri had torn them down as fast as he could, but Layback Spin Victor (Vancouver, 2010) had managed a hissed _Selfish_ before he could push the pile under the bed. Seeing the Vancouver logo in the bottom corner of the poster had reminded him: the question about the injury. After that, Victor must have known—well, suspected, at least—that Yuuri didn’t know who he was talking to. The request for a hug, the teeming patio … he wonders if it was meant as a trap, or a test.

Not that he could be mad about it, if it was. He deserved that, and worse. 

“So are you just staying here while you heal, or is this something longer?” Mari asks. She pulls out a cigarette and lets it droop, unlit, from between her lips. “You didn’t really say on the phone.”

“I …” he shrugs. Something about what happened in Tokyo feels like an ending, like a pose he might strike as he finishes a program. It’s hard to think about what comes afterwards. “I think Celestino wants me to come back to Detroit when I’m skating again. I don’t know.”

“Yeah, well, you know we’ll support you no matter what you do.” 

“Thanks.” 

The next three weeks pass slowly, time almost unbearable in its languid, quiet trickle. Yuuri spends hours in the hot springs, the heat soothing sore muscles but never touching the chill he carries deep with him. He spends hours, too, working through his rehabilitation exercises; not because he wants to, really, but because wherever he turns, someone is there, pestering him about it. His mother fusses at him, and feeds him and then asks cheerfully how he’s recovering and if there’s anything they can do to make things easier for him. Minako comes by twice daily, and drags Yuuri into her studio as soon as he’s clear to put weight on the foot, leading him through slow, careful strengthening exercises. 

Phichit’s interventions are less direct: he video chats Yuuri on his laptop, making breakfast while Yuuri stretches before bed. 

“You’ll be coming back, right?” he asks, one night, while Yuuri flexes the arch of his foot against a resistance band, curling and uncurling his toes. “Tell me you’re not thinking about retiring.” 

“I’m not young anymore, Phichit,” Yuuri says, hearing Celestino’s voice in his own. “And, you know—maybe it was a good note to go out on. Silver at Four Continents.”

Phichit frowns, the early morning light washing through the familiar space of their kitchen. A fourteen hour difference: only one of them under the sun at any given time. “No way. You hadn’t peaked yet, Yuuri, you’ve still got a million things left to do. Don’t retire because you’re afraid to run into Victor, okay?”

The thought has crossed his mind a few times, in the long boring stretches between exercises, when he’s looking for something to watch on YouTube and has to avoid video recommendations for _Victor Nikiforov’s quad flip! Amazing!!!_ The idea of skating at the same competition as Victor is a queasy one, sure, but it’s not that. It’s not _just_ that. “I’m not,” he says. The real problem is that, without Poodle’s support, it feels like there’s no-one that really wants to see him come back. Celestino doesn’t count—he’s a coach, it’s his _job_ —and Phichit might want Yuuri to come back to Detroit but that’s not really about Yuuri as a skater. 

“Have you texted him yet?”

“No. What would I say? You were there, Phichit. He never wants to talk to me again. He’s probably got my number blocked.” 

Phichit sighs and lets it go. “You’d better be back here by mid-summer. Detroit’s not the same without you, you know? I need someone to go pole dancing with.”

Celestino texts every day, and has a physiotherapist in Detroit email Yuuri an Exercise of the Day. _Do the exercises_ , Celestino says. _I expect you to text me each day when you complete them._

And so Yuuri does the Exercises, every Day, and he walks, too, long, rambling routes through Hasetsu. He doesn’t like the exercises but he does like the walking. It keeps him out from underfoot, so that his family isn’t tripping over him in the onsen. While he walks, Yuuri thinks: about skating, imaginary step sequences and spins he might do if he wasn’t injured, themes for routines; about his mother’s katsudon, how it still tastes the best, better than anywhere else, even though he can’t put a name to the difference; about Vicchan, about walking him along these same streets as a teenager. 

He doesn’t think about Victor. The posters stay under the bed, quiescent. 

(He does think about Victor. He thinks about Victor late at night, when he allows himself to open the conversation thread with Poodle—with Victor. Thinking of Poodle and Victor as the same person—of Victor saying _I really want to be in the same place as you again Yuuri_ —feels like trying to press two north-pole magnets together. 

He scrolls to the end of the thread, some nights, just to let _you don’t know who I am, do you?_ chew through his guts. _I did_ , he writes, in imaginary texts. _I did know who you were, even though I didn’t know your name._ )

(He does think about Victor. He thinks about Victor all the time, no matter how much he tries not to. The thoughts push through, like weeds between the stones in the sidewalk.)

“You’re not sleeping well,” Minako says, sharp, as he struggles through a beginner’s ballet warmup. “I can see it on your face.”

“It’s fine,” he pants. “I’m fine.” 

“Sleep is important for recovery.” 

“I’m fine.” 

At first, his leg feels like a stranger, out of sync with the rest of him, but soon it begins to feel more like an old acquaintance, a meeting after a long time apart: different, but familiar. He moves slowly, tentative, but the leg keeps up. The pain ebbs, flows, recedes. 

One morning, three weeks after his arrival in Hasetsu, he wakes to an email from Minami Kenjirou. 

**To:** kyuuri@gmail.com  
**From:** kenjiloopz@yahoo.com  
**Subject:** Hi!!!!

Katsuki-san my coach said I shouldn’t write you even though your coach gave her your email address but it’s the off-season now so she’s not in charge of me right? I thought maybe you could help me with my triple axel if I asked because it’s really inconsistent and yours is so good!!! Oh also I’m starting to think about my programs for next season and for my short program I have an idea for one where I could have a costume like your Lohengrin routine from 2013, what do you think of that???

Okay bye!

Minami Kenjirou  
Sent from my iPhone

Huh, Yuuri thinks. So Minami writes as breathlessly as he speaks. He writes a reply, because the only other things he could be doing right now are (a) going downstairs to sit around like a useless lump, getting in the way while his family tries to run a business, or (b) the Exercise of the Day, and today’s Exercise of the Day involves heel slides and he is _so tired_ of heel slides. 

**To:** kenjiloopz@yahoo.com  
**From:** kyuuri@gmail.com  
**Subject:** RE: Hi!!!!

Did you have to pick a program from my shameful past?

If you send me a video of your triple axel, I could try to give you some advice. I don’t really know if I can explain how to do it the way I do though.

Yuuri 

**To:** kyuuri@gmail.com  
**From:** kenjiloopz@yahoo.com  
**Subject:** RE: Hi!!!!  
_Attachment:_ 02042016.mp4 

A skater like you doesn’t have a shameful past!!! 

Here’s my triple axel thank you for looking Katsuki-san!

Sent from my iPhone

Yuuri does the heel slides while watching the video, then writes out some advice on Minami’s triple axel. Surprisingly, he does have things to say. A lot of things to say, actually. Some time in the last five months he’s developed an eye for the weak spot in a jump, and what could shore it up. And the axel—well, he does know something about axels. 

“Are you going out for your walk?” Mari asks, when he comes downstairs, the email sent. Yuuri usually tries to sneak out, so that his mother doesn’t feel a need to try to feed him or ask how he’s doing, but Mari is lurking near the front door, almost like she was waiting for him. 

“Yeah.” 

“Want some company?” 

“You don’t have to. I know you’ve got things to do here.”

She shrugs at the empty front room. “We’re not exactly busy right now.” 

Yuuri tends to walk the same routes every day. He wanders along the flat sandy stretch of the beach, or down the road that meanders along the edge of river, or up the rock-lined staircase that climbs the green slope to Hasetsu Castle. Today, he leads Mari to the castle route, and begins the plodding climb through the brilliant lime-green tunnel made by the arching trees. Mari seems content to smoke in silence as they rise, the only sound the rhythmic scrape of their shoes on the stone. 

“When I called you,” she says, as they reach the halfway point. “In December, before your free skate. About Vicchan, I mean. Should I have waited?” 

Yuuri stops, puts a hand out against the rough stone of the wall, trying for balance. “No,” he says. “I wanted to know. Of course I wanted to know.” 

Mari leans back against the wall, a few steps above him, and blows out a puff of smoke. “You still would have known if I’d told you after you skated. Did it screw you up?”

“Kind of,” he admits, the words surprising his mouth. All those months of spilling his thoughts to Victor have torn holes in his filter. “I might have messed up anyway, I don’t do very well under pressure. I …” he hesitates, and then plunges forward, a confession. “I don’t have very good control over my thoughts while I’m skating. That night I couldn’t stop thinking about how Vicchan was waiting here for me to come back, and I never did. I didn’t make it back before he died.” There’s a wet, rattling gurgle in the back of his throat, like water boiling in an electric kettle, and he slumps against the wall.

Mari doesn’t make the mistake of trying to touch him while he’s crying, just looks up and away for a minute. When Yuuri finally quiets to a simmer, she turns back. “Yuuri. You know he had a great life, right? Yeah, he missed you while you were gone—we all did—but he loved it here. And you know we’re not upset, that you went away to chase your dream? It’s not abandoning us, when you do that. It’s not selfish.”

“I—” 

“Seriously. If I said there was something I needed to do, that meant I had to move away, you’d support me, right?”

“Of course,” he says, voice thick with snot. 

“Well? You’re going to go back, right?” 

“I haven’t been very successful,” he manages. “I thought I could make you all proud if I won, but I haven’t. And now, if I go back, I’ll be at a disadvantage, because of”—he waves at his leg—“and so I don’t know if it’s worth it.”

She shakes her head. “Do you still love skating?”

The answer comes easily. “Yeah. I do.” 

“That seems like the answer, to me. And we’ll still be proud of you if you go back and lose absolutely everything, okay?”

They begin to climb again, each step bringing them closer to the top. It’s nice, Yuuri thinks. Nice to have someone beside him. “Thanks for coming with me,” he mutters. “I forget, sometimes, that it’s good to do things with company.”

“Yeah,” she says, kind of exasperated. “You’re not alone, Yuuri. It’s not weak to want help—you know that, right? You don’t have to act like you’re fighting alone.” 

He hadn’t felt alone, with Victor, and had thought that was something new. But maybe—he thinks of Phichit’s daily calls, and Celestino’s texts and Minako in the studio and Yuuko visiting him with the triplets—maybe Mari’s right. Maybe he’s never been alone. Maybe he just needs to pay more attention. “Hey. Since when have you gotten so smart?” he says, a laugh welling up.

“I always was,” she says, grinning. “You just didn’t notice.”

###

After Mari heads home, Yuuri wanders back down the hill to Ice Castle. He’s been avoiding it, but when he lets his feet choose the path he ends up in front of the rink, staring up at an enormous “Congratulations on Four Continents Silver Katsuki Yuuri” banner rippling on its upper reaches. 

Inside, Yuuko is on the ice, leading a class for six-year-olds. There are seven kids out there: the triplets, skating circles around the others and ignoring everything their mother says, and two girls and two boys he doesn’t recognize. Not bad, especially given Minako’s complaints about the lack of young people in Hasetsu. The class is bigger than the ones he remembers attending as as kid.

“Yuuri-kun!” Yuuko says, skating to the boards as the class winds up. 

“Hi, Yuuko-chan.” She had insisted, the first time she’d come by the onsen with the triplets, that he couldn’t call her Yuuko-san. 

“You’re not cleared to skate yet, right?”

“No, not for another couple weeks.” 

“Ah! When you can, you’ll have to come and skate with the Snow Rabbits.” She indicates the milling group of six-year-olds. They’re all trying to stare surreptitiously at Yuuri, except for the triplets, who are not trying to hide the fact that they’re snapping photos of him. 

“Oh, uh … would they like that?” 

She laughs. “They’d love it! You’re the reason they’re here, you know.”

“What?”

“I mean, my girls have always loved you, they’ve been watching you skate since they were in diapers, but there’s been a huge increase in kids taking lessons ever since you went to Detroit. And our numbers really surged when you made the Grand Prix Final, and then we had fifty additional kids sign up after you got the silver at Four Continents.” 

“Kihara Ryo and Miuri Kyoko won gold in pairs at the same event. And the Yoshida siblings won the Grand Prix Final in ice dance,” Yuuri mutters, flustered. “It was probably that.” 

“Oh, no, believe me, they’re definitely here for you! They love you.” 

The next group of kids to go out on the ice is a little older, maybe ten or so. Yuuri rests against the boards, shifting from leg to leg to keep anything from getting stiff, and watches as Yuuko guides them through the mechanics of a single toe loop. He remembers the sharp thrill of the first time he ever landed a jump—younger than this group, but then he’d started early—and the urgent desire to do it again, and again, and better. 

The kids laugh, at something Yuuko says, and line up to try the jump. The first two fall, but the third one lands it, and everyone claps. When Yuuri claps the boy who did the jump looks over at him and blushes. Yuuri remembers watching Victor, skating at the Junior Worlds, long hair spinning out behind him, and wanting so badly to be able to skate like that, and thinks about what Yuuko said. About the idea that there are people paying attention to him, inspired by him; that he might already _have_ a legacy, even if it’s just here, at this small-town rink in Kyushu. 

_I want to make my mark on someone_ , Victor had said, _so that I’m alive in someone’s heart and not just on the ice_. Maybe the worst part of everything that happened is that he _succeeded_. Yuuri misses Victor with an ache as constant as the pain in his ankle, misses him as much as he misses skating; he longs to talk to him, in the same way that he dreams of skating slow, careful figures, tracing his blade over the same line, again and again. 

What would he say, he wonders, if he was talking to Victor now, if he hadn’t screwed everything up? _I still want to skate_. And, if he’s being honest, _I still want to do the quad axel_. Yuuri hasn’t let himself think about the jump, not since the fall, but the desire is still there, buried deep. His reasons for wanting to do it have changed, though: it’s not about legacy, or about proving himself as a skater to Victor (it turns out, impossibly, that he’d already managed that). No; if he does it, it’ll be about proving something more complicated: that their connection was real, that it meant something, that something of what they shared lives on in Yuuri. That Victor _did_ leave a mark. There are a lot of things Yuuri can’t say with texts anymore, but even if Victor hates him and has his number blocked, there are other ways to send a message. 

It’s a lot for one jump to say, Yuuri thinks. But maybe four-and-a-half rotations is loud enough.

That night, at the desk in his room, Yuuri brings out a blank sheet of paper, and scratches out a draft list of components for a free skate, underlining the axel:

  1. 3Lz-3T
  2. CCSP
  3. 4A
  4. 3Lo
  5. FSSP
  6. 4F
  7. Chsq
  8. 4T+2T
  9. 3A+1Lo+3S
  10. CCosP



_Phichit_ , he texts. _Do you remember that composition student? The one I had compose some music for me last year?_

_Sure. Why?_

He fiddles with the phone for a moment, and then commits. _Could you track her down and ask if she’d be willing to re-do it?_

_No problem! You going to choreograph your own program?_

_Yeah,_ he writes. _Yeah, I think I am._

###

**Interlude: Tiger**

**St. Petersburg, Russia  
May 2016**

“No,” Victor says, frustrated. He crosses his ankles, one skate boot resting against the other, and brings a hand to his chin. This, Yuri has learned, is a sign that Victor has criticisms he wants to share. Victor has done it, on average, twelve times per skating session since he started choreographing the Agape program for Yuri. “You’re not doing it right.”

“I am _doing_ it just like you showed me,” Yuri hisses.

“Your hunger to win is getting in the way of the feeling,” Victor says, putting on his lecturing tone, which is just— _ugh_. Who does Victor Nikiforov think he is, that he can lecture Yuri Plisetsky? The problem is that he can’t just say that, because then Victor will go away and the program won’t be as good as it could be, and Yuri’s not going to give up a single scrap of possible advantage for his senior debut. “Skating’s not just about confidence, you know.”

“Alright. Fine. Tell me what it is about. Tell me what I should be thinking about when I skate your”—he swallows a series of rude words—“program.”

“Skating’s not about thinking, Yurio, it’s about feeling. It’s like this …” Victor pushes off, and runs through a portion of the choreographic sequence. It doesn’t look any more _agape_ than what Yuri just did. 

Unconditional love is nonsense, anyway. Everything has conditions. 

“Did you see?” Victor says, stopping, hands on hips. “Like that.” 

“No,” he snaps, reaching the limits of the leash on his tongue. “I don’t see. You should have given me the Eros routine instead of taking it yourself, if you think you’re so fucking great at Agape.”

“Come on, then,” Victor sighs. “Time to go to the banya.” 

This, too, has happened almost every session since they began working together. Victor decides that Yuri isn’t _getting it_ , whatever that means, drags him to Mytninskie Banya, and has Yuri jump into the cold-water plunge pools until his teeth are chattering. Of course Victor doesn’t bother to say what cold water has to do with agape; he just goes and enjoys the steam room. If his newfound obsession with the steam baths has anything to do with the fact that Katsudon apparently grew up in a bathhouse, Victor hasn’t mentioned it, but Yuri can do math. What he can’t do, no matter how much he spins the thought around in his head, is figure out why Victor would want to be reminded of that asshole. 

Yuri doesn’t understand a lot of things about what happened between Victor and Katsudon, actually. He understands that Victor was embarrassed—Georgi has described the scene on the patio too often for that to escape his notice—and he understands that Katsudon ran away (so, asshole) but he doesn’t understand—well, a lot of things. Victor had come back from Tokyo as fragile as spun sugar, brittle and snapping; he’s not that bad anymore, but he’s still burying something beneath sunny smiles and winks and that awful lecturing tone. He’s back to the unhappy Victor that Yuri met when he joined Yakov’s rink, but he doesn’t seem to be doing anything about it, other than skating a lot and lecturing Yuri about unconditional love. 

“How is your free program going?” Victor asks, as they sign in at the banya. “You like living with Lilia?” 

“It’s fine. She yells a lot.” 

“She does,” Victor agrees. “That’s part of her charm. She and Yakov are getting along alright?”

“They don’t yell at each other, so I guess so.” Lilia and Yakov are another thing that Yuri doesn’t understand: most of the time it feels like there’s a barbed-wine fence lying between them, but then there are odd moments too, like when one of them passes something to the other over the breakfast table without needing to be asked, where it seems like they have an unspoken line of communication that hasn’t been severed by their years apart. 

“Victor,” he blurts out, as they approach the door to the cold pools. “Victor. With Katsudon—why didn’t you just … I don’t know. Why don’t you just talk to him? Yeah, he’s an asshole, I get that, but …” He doesn’t quite have words for why it rubs him the wrong way. If Katsudon doesn’t remember the banquet, doesn’t that mean—couldn’t they start again? As if none of it had ever happened? And anyway, Victor is an asshole in his own way, that’s hardly a real problem.

“There’s no point,” Victor says, cold, in a tone that suggests that he’s enormously grown-up and Yuri is a child. 

“Bullshit,” Yuri says, because he saw the two of them in Sochi. They were all over each other. 

Victor doesn’t answer, but he must be flustered, because he lets Yuri follow him into the parilka instead of sending him off to the plunge pools. 

“Are you mad at him?” Yuri asks, after they’ve marinated in the scent of wet birch smoke for a while. “I’d be mad at him.” 

“No,” Victor says, eyes closed, stretched out. “Not anymore.”

“You were, though?”

Victor sighs. “Leave it alone, Yurio.”

“Why? I want to know. I was there, too. In Sochi, I mean.” 

“He didn’t want—” Victor cuts himself off. His teeth grinding together sound like a blade-sharpening machine. “Leave it, okay?” 

Fine, Yuri thinks. Whatever. If Victor doesn’t want to let him solve this problem, he won’t.

###

**Hasetsu, Kyushu  
May-July, 2016**

Yuuri returns to the ice in the first week of May, under the watchful eyes of Minako and Yuuko (and, he suspects, the triplets, who have some uncanny ability to tell when there might be a social media opportunity; Phichit would get along great with the triplets). He’s more tentative than the Snow Rabbits, but everything feels … okay. Not perfect, but okay. Celestino is right to say that his body can’t snap back as quickly as it would have even a couple years ago, but he has time; there are months still until the Grand Prix series starts. The Nishigoris have agreed to let him skate at Ice Castle whenever there’s nothing else booked for the ice, which is good, because he’s decided to stay in Hasetsu until he’s back up to jumping speed and done putting together his choreography. Phichit is disappointed—“You’ll be back by August, though?”—but seems to understand. 

“I’m glad you’re enjoying being at home,” he says, over the fuzzy video chat. Yuuri can see the hamsters running along the back cushion of the couch, little pixelated blobs. “I kind of thought you might be depressed, after what happened with Victor, but you look happy.” 

“Yeah, well.” He is happy, even if thinking about Victor is still painful. “I was, at first, but there’s nothing I can do about it. And I spent so long thinking he was someone else that I guess I never got used to the idea of having Victor Nikiforov in my life, so I haven’t really lost anything.”

The song for his free skate arrives in the second week of May. It’s perfect: he can hear the arc of his own career in the crescendo of the repeated piano motif, and more than that, echoes of the new theme he asked the composer to incorporate. _Love_. 

“What are you going to call the song?” Yuuko asks, as she watches Yuuri glide through the bones of his free skate, minus the jumps. He’s not ready for jumps, not yet. He can already tell that the first fall he takes will be excruciating—not for his body, at least hopefully not, but for the moment of waiting to know whether he’s torn something again. 

“I don’t know. I’ll figure it out before I have to compete again, I guess?”

“What about your short program? Are you going to choreograph that, too?”

He skates over to the boards, where the CD player is, and swaps out the free skate CD for another one. “I found this the other day—I usually prefer instrumental pieces, but I thought … well, I can kind of see a program to it, you know? I like the energy.”

Yuuri doesn’t mention the other reason: it appeals to him, the idea of skating to a song called “History Maker,” in the season where he’s going to try to land the quad axel. The lyrics seem right: _There’ll be no more darkness when you believe in yourself, you are unstoppable …_

Well. He can only hope that’s true. 

After two weeks on the ice, Yuuri jumps, and lands a triple toe loop. He falls on a quad salchow, and gets back up, with no consequence but a few bruises. Both his programs go from idea to sketch to painting, until he’s confident enough in them to have the triplets make videos of him skating and email them to Celestino. 

“What do you think?” he asks, nervous, watching Celestino on the screen. Phichit has set up the video chat at the rink in Detroit, and is lurking in the background, watching the conversation under the guise of offering technical support.

Celestino makes an indecipherable motion with one hand, then shakes his head. “If I’d known that all it would take for you to take control of your own skating was to send you home for the summer, I would have done it a long time ago,” he says. “Yuuri, this is all great. I think the quads in the free skate are ambitious, but you showed at Four Continents that you could do them, so if that’s what you want …” 

“Uh, yeah. About that,” he says, squirming a little in his desk chair. He’s doing all the quads as triples in practice, still, while he builds strength and confidence, but Celestino has a modified version of the component list. The list Yuuri sent didn’t have the 4A on it; at first he’d thought he’d keep going in secret, but Mari’s comment has stuck with him: _it’s not weak to want help_. “There’s one other quad I want to do.” 

“It’s not the loop, is it? You don’t need a quad loop.” 

“No. I want to ratify the quad axel.” 

Dead silence, and then Phichit says, “ _Ohhhhhhh_ ,” like he’s finally figured something out, and Celestino says, very flat: “Why?” 

Which is what Victor said, too. This time Yuuri doesn’t bother with the explanations. “It’s a long story. Just … I want to do it. My goal is to do it at the Grand Prix Final.” 

“You’re coming back from a serious injury, Yuuri, this is not the time,” Celestino says, and then catches himself. “Wait. Is that what you were doing when you fell?” Yuuri shrugs, but Celestino doesn’t need the answer to know he’s right. “Dammit, Yuuri, I’m your coach! You need to tell me these things.” 

“I’m telling you now,” he offers. 

“Victor knows, doesn’t he?” Phichit asks, popping into view. “You told him?”

“Victor Nikiforov?” Celestino says, lost. “What about him? Why would you tell Victor Nikiforov?” 

“Never mind,” Phichit says, skipping away again, and Celestino puts one bemused hand over his eyes, sighs gustily, and then shakes his head. 

“Can I talk you out of it?”

“No.” If busting his leg and losing Victor’s support couldn't convince him, Yuuri’s certain Celestino can’t. 

“Fine. But don’t you dare try that jump until you’re landing everything else with confidence.”

A grin splits his face. “Yes, Coach.”

###

Time speeds up with summer’s arrival. Yuuri spends intense hours in the studio with Minako, working on movement training, trying to imbue the History Maker routine with the sense of ebullient, bouncy lift that he imagines. It doesn’t come as easily as the calm, focused flow he wants in the free skate, but it’s getting there. 

In July, Minami Kenjirou comes down from Fukuoka and stays at the onsen for a few days, and Yuuri gives him tips on his triple axel. It’s weirdly fun, and afterwards his mother asks whether he’s thinking about going into coaching when he retires, and Yuuri surprises himself and says “Yes.” He _hasn’t_ been thinking about it, not in those words, but then again maybe he has. He’s never been the best at putting names to his feelings. 

He skates with the Snow Rabbits, and the Snowy Owls, and all the other kids who come to Ice Castle.

“I told you they love you,” Yuuko says, laughing, and Yuuri doesn’t argue with her.

The day before his flight back to Detroit, Yuuri walks over to Ice Castle at dusk, knowing the ice will be empty. 

He’s done what he came to Hasetsu to do, and more, he thinks, as he laces up his skates. He went to the beach and listened to the black-tailed gulls, and said goodbye to Vicchan; he walked with Mari and talked about her life and his own and what he’d missed in the last five years. He ate enough katsudon that he thinks the memory of the flavour will hold on for another five years, even though it won’t have to: he’s promised to come back again next off-season. He danced in Minako’s studio and climbed the steps to the temple and went out to Mikaeri no Taki Falls and shivered beneath the spray until his mind was empty of everything but the feeling of water against his skin. 

There’s only one thing left to do, before he leaves.

###

**Interlude: Axel**

Nishigori Axel is not supposed to be at Ice Castle right now. She is definitely not supposed to be crouched by the boards with her phone camera pointed at the ice, and if anybody finds out, it’s her head that’s going to roll at home. The thing is, though, that it had been clear from Yuuri’s expression when he’d come in and started lacing up that he meant to do something interesting. Of course Axel had asked Loop and Lutz to run one of their distraction protocols so that she could sneak back in and watch (and film). Loop is probably doing their favourite, _I’m injured but can’t quite explain how because I’m crying too hard,_ which gives Axel five minutes, give or take. Maybe twice that, if Dad gets involved, because he’s a big softie. 

For the first minute, Yuuri is totally boring, just skating around the rink and muttering to himself, but then he pauses at the other end of the ice, says, very clearly, “Okay. I’m going to do it,” and starts a long, fast entry. He turns around and oh, that’s nice, her namesake jump—

One. Two. Three. Four, and a half.

He lands it, clean. 

What. What? “Was that a _quad axel_?” she squeaks, standing up. “It was, right. You landed a quad axel. The Internet’s going to go _wild_ when I upload this.” 

Yuuri whips around, spots her—as usual, he’s not wearing his glasses on the ice, so probably he’s not entirely sure which Nishigori triplet he’s facing—and starts frantically shaking his head. “No, no, no, it’s a secret, please don’t, okay? I don’t …” but then he hesitates, and frowns. “Wait. Your phone can send videos, right?” 

Yuuri is a really good skater, but sometimes he says the silliest things. “Yeah? Obviously?”

“And you were filming? When I—when I landed it?” He shakes his head, like he’s not entirely sure he believes what he’s just done.

“Yeah.” The _silliest_.

“Could you send it to someone? The video, I mean.”

“Okay, so,” Axel says, hands to hips. “You want me to keep this video off the Internet, and _also_ you want me to send it to someone?”

“Yeah. Is that okay? Can you do it?” 

It’ll be a pain not to be able to post the video—it would _totally_ go viral; she’s not as good at judging that as Lutz is, but this one’s easy—but sometimes it’s nice to have a secret. “What’s in it for me?”

For a man who wants a big favour from a six-year-old, Yuuri seems awfully reluctant to offer a trade. “What … what would you want?”

“A coaching session,” she decides. “For me”—because she’s a good sister, and Loop and Lutz did make this possible—“and my sisters. Tomorrow, before your flight.”

He considers, then nods. “Deal.” 

“I’m not done. _And_ I want to film a video of you talking about skating in Hasetsu, so I can post that instead.” This is something Lutz asked Yuuri about, once, and he’d blushed and said no-one would want to see it ( _silly_ ) and then Mom forbade them from pestering him about it afterwards.

“Fine.”

“Okay, give me the number where you want to send it.” Yuuri pulls out his own phone and reads out an international number. “What do you want to say?” 

“Uh. Just say, uh …” he considers, then nods, with a soft smile. “Say ‘Yuuri wanted you to see this.’”

###

**October-December, 2016**

_(Live footage of Katsuki Yuuri at centre ice in the Sears Centre in Chicago, Illinois, waiting to perform his short program during Skate America. He is wearing black pants, a white button-up shirt, and black suspenders.)_

Morooka Hisashi _(voiceover)_ : Katsuki suffered a serious injury last March, right before the World Championships in Tokyo, and this is his first competition since his return. He is skating to “History Maker” …

###

_(Footage of an interview scrum following the completion of the free skate at Skate America. Katsuki Yuuri, who finished in fourth, looks calm, maybe even pleased.)_

**Katsuki Yuuri** : I’m not quite back to where I was before the injury yet. There are things I need to work on before the Cup of China, but I think this was a good start. 

**Reporter** : Your theme for this season is love, is that right? 

**Katsuki Yuuri** : That’s right. There have been so many people who have helped me in my competitive skating career, but I’d never thought of it as love until this year. Then—someone—helped me see that what I’m expressing on the ice, when I skate, is something like what you might call love …

###

 **Tiger**  
you suck Katsudon 8:42 PM  
not good enough 8:42 PM  
don’t fucking ignore me asshole 9:05 PM

###

 **Victor’s golden skate blades** @nikiforovfanatic  
OMG Victor’s Eros routine is SO HOT what the fuck  
like that WINK at the beginning hnnnnghhh

 **quello che fa per te** @VICTORious  
Replying to @nikiforovfanatic  
do you think he’s thinking about anyone while he skates it, like is he seducing someone specific

 **Victor’s golden skate blades** @nikiforovfanatic  
Replying to @VICTORious  
god I bet he is, I don’t know if you could skate like that if you weren’t

###

 **FS Newswire** — December 6, 2016 — The 2016 ISU Grand Prix Final kicks off this Friday in Barcelona, with a competitive lineup in all disciplines. In the men’s field, the defending ISU Grand Prix Final gold medallist Victor Nikiforov (RUS) and last year’s bronze medallist Jean-Jacques Leroy (CAN) lead the standings with two victories each on the circuit. Nikiforov won at the NHK Trophy and the Rostelecom Cup, while Leroy notched victories at Skate Canada and Trophée de France.

World bronze medalist Otabek Altin (KAZ), ISU Junior Grand Prix Final Champion Yuri Plisetsky (RUS) and Phichit Chulanont (THA) all qualified for their first Final (senior level), with Altin winning Skate America and placing second at Trophée de France. Chulanont became the first Thai skater to win an ISU Grand Prix event at the Cup of China, then added a fourth-place finish at the Rostelecom Cup. In his first season as a senior skater, Plisetsky took home two silver medals, at Skate Canada and the NHK Trophy.

While defending ISU Grand Prix Final silver medallist and reigning World Champion Christophe Giacometti (SUI) qualified for the Final with two second-place finishes, he withdrew from competition as a result of an ankle injury sustained during his free skate at the Rostelecom Cup. His spot at the Final is taken by Yuuri Katsuki (JPN), the next-closest qualifier, who returns to his second Final after a fourth-place finish at Skate America and a second-place finish at the Cup of China …

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yuuri’s comment about the successful skating by the other members of Team Japan was inspired by a tweet by @ericaceam.
> 
> Yes, I changed some (most) of the Grand Prix assignments from canon. Let’s assume that having Victor still in the mix changed everything.


	5. Fourth Rotation, and Half a Rotation More

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Enormous thanks and credit on this chapter go to phnelt, who held my hand through my nerves about writing the E-rated parts of this, providing both incredibly helpful feedback and a number of excellent ideas that I incorporated wholesale.
> 
> CW for a canon-typical (or milder than canon, maybe) reference in passing to Yuuri’s need to control his diet while competing.

**Barcelona, Spain  
Saturday, December 10, 2016  
ISU Grand Prix Final, Men’s Free Skate**

_(Live footage of Katsuki Yuuri on the ice at the Centre de Conventions International de Barcelona, performing his free skate. The music is still in the initial pattern of ascending runs on the piano, leading up to a high B chord where a jump would naturally go. As he glides across the ice, the light glints off a gold chain clasped around his neck.)_

**Morooka Hisashi** : _(voiceover)_ … he’s got a triple axel planned to start things off …

###

**Barcelona, Spain  
ISU Grand Prix Final  
Tuesday, December 6, 2016**

“You sure? I’m going to go to Sagrada Familia,” Phichit says, from the bathroom, while Yuuri slumps facedown onto his bed. “It looks so cool at night.” 

“Too tired,” Yuuri mutters, pillow swallowing the words. “Jet lag. Still in Detroit, sleep-wise.” Which makes no sense, because in Detroit it’s barely lunchtime, but he is tired; he was jittery the whole flight, elbowing Celestino every time he tried to turn the page on the in-flight magazine, eyes blurring on an article about contemporary dance in Madrid. 

“You’ve got to eat, though, right?” A pause, while Phichit brushes his teeth. “Celestino’s going to come out for dinner. It’ll be like hotpot in Beijing!”

“You say that like it’s a good thing,” Yuuri says, rolling onto his side and peering back at Phichit, who is now fussing with his hair. The soft pineapple scent of his hair wax permeates the hotel room. “Celestino was _so_ drunk.” It had taken Phichit, Guang Hong, Leo and Yuuri all together to wrangle Celestino back to his room during the Cup of China, and he’d been monosyllabic during their short programs the next day. 

“It turned out pretty well for us, though, right? Gold and silver …” Phichit leans in to look at something in the mirror, then swirls around, excited. “Maybe Celestino getting wasted is our good luck charm!” 

Yuuri laughs. “Go get him drunk, then. I’ll stay here and soak up the good luck.” 

“Tell the truth, Yuuri. Are you staying in because you’re nervous about seeing Victor?” 

He shakes his head, then sighs. He’s trying to be more honest about his feelings, both with himself and with the people who care enough to ask. “Maybe a little.” 

Phichit comes out of the bathroom and flops down on the end of the bed. “I told you, he was really nice to me at Rostelecom,” he says. “He didn’t act like someone that hates everything and everyone associated with you. He asked me about my programs and about how I got into skating in Thailand, and he congratulated me when I made it to the Final.”

“Yeah, because he doesn’t care anymore. It’s been almost nine months since Tokyo, Phichit. He probably doesn’t even remember what happened.” Yuuri’s come to terms with the idea that none of it mattered to Victor, at least not the way it did to Yuuri. That, or Victor hates him. He doesn’t know which would be worse, but it all comes down to the same thing: silence, and an empty ache whenever his phone buzzes. 

He’d hoped for a while for a reply to the quad video text; he’d called home to Hasetsu to ask about it as soon as he’d landed back in Detroit, blurting out “Did you get a response from Victor?” before he’d realized his mistake. Axel had squealed so loudly that Yuuri had been forced to pull the phone away from his ear. 

“I sent a text to _Victor Nikiforov_? Oh no, oh no, oh no, I’ve got to text him again, what should I say when I text him”—her voice muffled, a little—“Mom? Can I text Victor Nikiforov? Yuuri gave me his number …”

His little slip had two consequences: first, he’d been forced to tell Yuuko the whole story, about Poodle and the quad axel and everything that happened in Tokyo. (“What were you thinking, Yuuri-kun? Oh, no, this is _terrible_ , he probably thinks you don’t like him!” she’d said, when Yuuri got to the elevator part of the story. “No, no, he just hates me,” he’d explained, not quite able to keep his voice even.) And, second: in order to get the triplets to agree not to barrage Victor with more texts, Yuuri had to promise that when he retired, he would coach them to Olympic glory. 

(“All of you?”

“All of us. I’ll get gold, of course, but there _are_ three spots on the podium.”

“Uh. I … alright?”)

No matter how often he called for an update, though, there was never anything to report. And after faltering at Worlds, Victor has been a dominant, clinical force all season; the Victor who skated at Rostelecom didn’t skate like a man still obsessing over a few months’ worth of text messages. That Eros routine … (Yuuri shivers, a little, at the thought of it. The first time he he’d seen the program, watching NHK on his laptop, he’d masturbated furiously afterwards, nearly knocking the laptop off the bed while he came. That loose red silk shirt, open at the throat … that _wink_. Yuuri thinks he could get all his clothes off in less time than it takes to land a quad axel, if that wink was directed at him.) 

Anyway. He’d known from the very beginning that Poodle would eventually realize that Yuuri wasn’t worth the effort. Probably Victor didn’t even watch the video. 

“C’mon, Yuuri,” Phichit sighs. “You’re at least going to _try_ to talk to him while we’re here, right?” 

Yuuri groans and smushes his face back into the pillow. It smells like dust, like the accumulated weight of a thousand heads. He knows he _should_ try again, not because he expects it to go anywhere, but because he owes himself a try at a better apology—Yuuko had been very detailed about what she saw as the flaws in his apology, when he’d described it—but the very thought of talking to Victor makes his entire body freeze up, the rigor mortis of anticipatory embarrassment. He pushes the edge of the pillow down, so that Phichit can still hear him. “I don’t … well. I’m trying to send him a message. With—you know.”

Phichit pokes him in the arch of the foot, startling a yelp from Yuuri. “Are you talking about the quad axel? Yuuri, are you telling me that the quad axel is meant, as, like … a love confession?” 

“More like an apology?” he mumbles. Not that it really matters, if Victor’s not watching, if he doesn’t want to see. But that doesn’t mean Yuuri can’t skate how he feels. He’s given months of single-minded focus to the jump, probably to the detriment of the rest of his skating, because it feels like something he has to do—something he has to say, even if it’s just to himself. “There are layers.” 

“Oh my god, Yuuri,” Phichit groans. “Why are you like this? That’s like trying to send an apology by semaphore. No. It’s worse than that. At least semaphore is a _language_.”

“Skating—skating’s a language,” Yuuri says, rolling over. “We’re saying something, when we skate. Right?”

“Yeah, we’re saying something, but you know what else would be saying something? Talking to him. Just. Talk to him? Try.” 

“I can’t. If I do it before I skate …” He leaves the consequences unspoken. And even if he does talk to Victor, even if Victor somehow forgives him or wants to hear his apology, what then? What if whatever they had isn’t there in real life? It’s cleaner just to dedicate a jump to him, and leave it at that.

“So do it after!” 

“He doesn’t want to hear it,” Yuuri mumbles. 

“Ugh,” Phichit says. “Whatever! I’m going out.”

###

**Interlude: Tiger**

**Barcelona, Spain  
ISU Grand Prix Final  
Wednesday, December 7, 2016**

These are the last five men Yuri Plisetsky would pick to have join him on the ice for a public practice session, if he had any choice in the matter. Chulanont, Katsudon’s rinkmate, is alright—he smiles too much, but whatever—and Otabek Altin is a stone-faced cipher, but the other three are the most annoying people in the world. He can already hear Victor’s critiques of Agape: _you lost focus in that last jumping pass, Yurio! Your footwork’s sloppy, you’re thinking too much again!_ Victor loves to go around acting like he’s Yuri’s coach, which, _ugh_. He’s already got Yakov and Lilia, he doesn’t need another person watching him all the time. 

Then there’s the Canadian: as soon as everyone’s on the ice, he starts blabbing at full volume about how good his programs are and how he’s the only one that can _blah, blah, blah_. Such an asshole. Yuri has no intention of ever losing to this braying donkey and his “Theme of King JJ” again. 

And then Katsudon. Fucking Katsudon. _He_ spends the first few minutes of the practice dithering by the boards, apparently unwilling to put his skates where his mouth is and run through the bombastic piece of bullshit that is his short program ( _History Maker?_ Who does he think he’s kidding?). 

It’s so irritating. Tired of it, Yuri skates up up behind Katsudon and hisses, “Something on your mind?” 

Katsudon almost falls over. For ten minutes after that, Yuri’s jumps have a little extra lift, and his mood is fucking _sparkling_. 

“Good, Yuratchka,” Yakov says, from the boards. “Run it again. Watch the entry on the combination.” 

Yuri glances over at Victor, waiting for the inevitable comment, but Victor isn’t watching him; he isn’t even skating, not really. Instead, he’s flopping around the ice, stealing looks at Katsudon and then turning away right before Katsudon notices. Of course, Katsudon is doing exactly the same thing to Victor. It’s like some weird mating dance involving near-sighted walruses. It’s horrid. They’re like _teenagers_.

Not my business, Yuri thinks, and almost flubs a jump. _None of my fucking business_. Victor made that abundantly clear, all through the autumn: every time Yuri tried to talk to him about Katsudon, Victor stopped listening. Victor’s silence hadn’t stopped Yuri from figuring out what the problem is, though. It turns out that Victor has somehow got it in his head that Katsudon doesn’t like him. 

Initially, he’d rejected this theory. Yuri, to his eternal regret, remembers Sochi, and it seems physically impossible that anyone who was there could believe that Katsuki Fucking Yuuri doesn’t like Victor Nikiforov. Katsudon _named his dog after Victor_. But then—somewhere around the fifteenth time Victor dragged Yuri to Yarumen to mope over a bowl of breaded pork cutlets—Yuri had been forced to accept that Victor did, in fact, believe it. 

(This revelation gave Yuri a headache, and also made him wonder how many times in his life Victor has felt like people don’t really like him for himself, but just for reflected glory or prestige or whatever. _That_ thought made him sad, which in turn made him want to puke. He’d called Moscow to talk to Grandpa about it, and afterwards he’d felt a lot better about the Agape program but not any better about Victor.) 

But: not his business. He is _not_ going to try to talk to Victor about it again after practice.

“Hey, Katsudon! Watch this, so you can see how you’re supposed to do it!” he yells, so that he doesn’t have to watch any more of the longing glances, and then does a couple quad sals with both arms raised above his head. 

“Yuratchka! Enough,” Yakov yells. “You’re done for the morning.” 

“Nice moves, but that’s not enough to beat me,” the Canadian says, skating by. 

“Douche,” Yuri hisses, at his retreating back. Otabek Altin, the only other skater close enough to hear, chuckles. 

“I think in Canada they would say _douche-canoe_ ,” he says, cool, and Yuri almost chokes with the effort of holding back a laugh. He’s Yuri Plisetsky; he doesn’t laugh at other people’s jokes in public. It is funny, though. Since when is Altin funny?

After the practice ends, Yuri gets swarmed by a camera crew, because everyone wants to talk to him about the being the _youngest qualifier and do you think you have enough experience to hold your own_ and that sort of bullshit, and so by the time Yuri makes it back to the hotel, Victor has already disappeared.

 **тигр**  
hey where’d you go asshole 4:35 PM

 **Мудак**  
sightseeing 4:35 PM  
why, you want to get dinner later? 4:36 PM

When he looks up from his phone, Katsudon’s rinkmate is crossing the lobby, wearing a face mask and carrying a selfie stick. Huh. Maybe he can solve this problem from the other end. “Hey! You.” 

“Me?” Chulanont says, raising an eyebrow and coming to a stop. “What about me?”

“What’s the pig”—he swallows, and changes tactics—“what’s Katsuki’s room number?”

“Why? You want to yell at him?”

“Yeah I want to yell at him! I want to tell him to go and fucking talk to Victor already!” 

“Oh,” Chulanont says, nodding. “Yeah, I’ve already tried that a bunch of times. But maybe it’ll work if it comes from you? We’re in 1838.”

When Yuri knocks on the door of 1838, there’s a burst of harried Japanese from the other side, and then Katsudon pulls the door open, hair still damp from the shower, glasses off. He blinks, doe-eyed. “Oh,” he says. “Uh. Hi? Can I help you?”

“Fuck you, Katsudon,” Yuri says. (Not exactly how he’d planned to start the conversation, but a difficult entry’s worth more points anyway.) “Can you just fucking talk to him already?” 

Katsudon sputters, a sound like car wheels spinning on wet pavement. “He doesn’t want to talk to me! He hates me! Or”—he droops, obviously miserable at the thought—“maybe he just doesn’t care at all, I don’t know. But he doesn’t want to talk to me.”

Right, Yuri thinks. So Victor is as dense as a block of stone birch, and Katsudon’s just as bad. 

“Listen, because I’m never talking about this again, okay?” He elbows his way into the room, and Katsudon stumbles back and slumps down onto the end of one of the beds. “Victor has dragged me to eat katsudon so many times in the last six months, you understand? And one time he decided he was going to learn how to make katsudon pirozhki and Victor, I don’t know if you know this, but he _cannot fucking cook_. It was a nightmare. I had to eat that shit! _Twice!_ He does not fucking hate you. He thinks _you_ don’t like him! He thinks that when you found out you’d been talking to Victor Nikiforov you just went”—Yuri makes a retching noise—“ _hurk, hurk, hurk_ , you know? Like you were so disappointed it was him that you fucked off and never spoke to him again. He thinks you wanted it to be someone else, Pavel Karev or whatever. He doesn’t even talk to Karev anymore, you know that? He doesn’t hate you, balvan! You made him _sad_.” 

“Oh,” Katsudon says, pathetically. He fumbles his glasses on, and peers up at Yuri, brown eyes huge and damp. “Oh, no. That’s not—I wanted it to be him! I do like him!”

“Yeah obviously! You named your dog after him! Sorry about your dog, by the way.” 

“Uh? Yeah, thanks. Um.” Katsudon stands up, runs his hands through his hair, wipes them on the hem of his t-shirt, sits back down, and then— _bozhe moi_ —bounces back up again. “What should I do?”

Yuri throws his arms in the air. “Go and talk to him! Right now, so I can stop thinking about this!”

“Okay. Right.” Katsudon starts pacing along the side of the bed, worrying at the ends of the sleeves on his wood-green cardigan. “Where is he right now?” 

“How would I know? I’m not his babysitter!” When Katsudon flashes Yuri another wet, beseeching look, though, Yuri has his phone out a half-second later. Anything to avoid watching Katsudon cry. _Where are you at exactly? Like, right this moment,_ he asks, and after a few more texts he has Victor’s location narrowed down. “He’s going to Barcelona Cathedral. To listen to a choir sing, or something. Probably to think about you.”

“Thanks, Yuri,” Katsudon says, and just fucking glomps onto him, before Yuri has a chance to make his escape. “Thank you.” 

“Yeah. Whatever.” The hug isn’t so bad, he decides, if it’s the price he pays for never having to think about any of this ever again. He pats Katsudon on the back, just once. “Just don’t fuck it up, okay?”

###

Yuuri finds Victor standing with his back to choir, staring up into the twilit reaches of the cathedral’s vault. The choir is loud enough to cover the sound of Yuuri’s approach; it gives him a moment, the span of a breath, just to stand behind Victor and look: at the tight clench of his gloved hands behind his back, at the elegant fall of his black coat off his shoulders, at the way the evening sun bleeds through the intricate webs of glass and limns him in a dusty halo. It gives Yuuri a moment to hope.

The soprano voices arc up, straining towards some place that’s just out of reach. Yuuri shivers and reaches out, too: “Victor?”

Victor turns, and his face does something complicated that Yuuri can’t quite read. “What are you doing here, Yuuri?” 

“I …” he swallows. _Don’t fuck this up._ Yuuko had made an itemized list of what was wrong with his first apology, but he can’t remember a single point on it now. “Yuri Plisetsky? He said—well, he says you don’t hate me, and I don’t know if that’s true, but I thought, maybe, if—well, anyway, I … I want to apologize again. And to say that”—it all comes out in a rush, the words tumbling over each other on his tongue—“I did know who you were. Not that I knew it was you, I mean, uh. That doesn’t make sense, I’m sorry. I guess what I mean is that I really liked the person I was talking to, even when I didn’t know who it was.” A shift of the light has drawn a shadow over Victor’s face, hiding his reaction. “And I wasn’t upset that it was you. I wanted it to be you.” He’d wanted it to be Victor so badly he hadn’t even let himself think about it.

“I even let myself hope—well, for a bit, but then—I mean. It was confusing.” He swallows. Victor hasn’t said anything, but also he hasn’t yelled or walked away, and so—good, right? It’s probably still a terrible apology, Yuuko would tell him there was still room for improvement, but it’s better than the last one. Probably. “And so … yeah. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I ran away and I’m sorry if I made you think I don’t like you.” 

“Why didn’t you just say you didn’t know who I was, Yuuri?” Victor says. He steps closer, and Yuuri has always known, in theory, that Victor is taller than he is, but in person it’s overwhelming. Yuuri feels dizzy with it, with the way Victor’s cedar scent mixes with the musty, resinous smell of the nave. He thinks he might pass out if Victor touches him. “Why didn’t you just _ask?_ ”

“I—I kept thinking that I could figure it out, and then it wouldn’t be a problem anymore. And then I guess I thought I’d never have to let you know, and … I’m anxious, I don’t know if you know that? Probably you do, from that whole thing while I was at All-Japan, but after that I kind of tried to hide it from you, so maybe you don’t … Anyway. Yeah. Anxious.” He closes his eyes, so that he doesn’t have to see the Balearic blue of Victor’s eyes bearing down on him like a wave. “Sorry. I’m really nervous right now. That’s not a feeling you get, I know, you’re always so confident—”

“Yuuri.” Victor touches him, on the cheek, with the tip of one gloved finger. Yuuri doesn’t pass out, but it’s a near thing. “Yuuri, look at my hand.” Victor peels off one of the gloves, slowly, and when he holds his hand out between them, Yuuri can see that it’s trembling. “I am confident when I skate, yes, but …” Victor fumbles the glove, trying to put it back on, and Yuuri catches it, crushes the plush leather in one fist. “Yuuri, I am so nervous about this, that I can’t—I’ve been trying to remember the English words to say _ya proshchayu tebya_ since I turned around, and I just can’t. I can’t remember.” 

Yuuri touches Victor’s bare hand, warm and dry and shaking, and runs his fingers up the palm. “Maybe,” he says, breathless. The heartbeat in Victor’s wrist flutters beneath his fingertips. “Maybe we could start again. If you can forgive me, I mean. We could just start again, and get to know each other—I mean, I feel like I already know you, but—”

“Yes,” Victor says. The voices of the choir leap up again, resonant, echoing, triumphant. “That’s it, Yuuri. That’s what I want to say: I forgive you. Yuuri—can I have that hug, now? You promised me a hug.” 

“Oh,” he says, startled. Nine months ago, he’d promised a Victor a hug. A lifetime ago, really—but apparently Victor still remembers. “Right—a hug—okay. Yes, sorry.” He puts his arms out and wraps them around Victor, cautious and a little stiff, but then Victor’s bare hand skims up to tangle in his hair, pinning him in place. 

“I’ve been waiting for this hug for a long time, Yuuri,” Victor murmurs, the soft hush of his breath warming the back of Yuuri’s neck. “I deserve a good one, yes? So don’t let go.”

###

_(A picture of of two young men on a motorcycle, riding down one of the narrow alleys that dots the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona.)_

**angel_of_yuri** tell me I’m not imagining this??? is that Yuri Plisetsky on the back of a motorcycle with Otabek Altin???

**Liked by 12,300 people**

###

When Victor finally steps back—the choir has sung an entire hymn during their hug—all the worries that were cauterized by the laser focus of Yuuri’s need to apologize begin to bleed back through. They’ve spoken to each other in person three times (as far as Yuuri’s memory goes, at least), and two of those were catastrophes. What now? What does Victor want from him? There’s no map to follow, here; he doesn’t know their destination. 

He flails around for something to say, and finds he’s still squeezing Victor’s glove between his fingers. “Oh, uh. Here? You probably want this back, don’t want one cold hand,” he says, and then immediately wishes for a backspace button for his mouth. He would never have hit send on _that_ , if they were texting. Hopefully the light in the church is dim enough to hide the splotchy blush climbing up his cheeks.

Victor takes the glove, though, and smiles. “If we’re starting again, Yuuri, we should get lost while looking for a restaurant that serves katsudon,” he says, like he’s still Poodle, sending 🥰 or 🤣 in response to some awkward thought of Yuuri’s. That was all Victor, Yuuri thinks. It was Victor—this Victor, with his sweet smile and starlit hair and long clever fingers—that complimented Yuuri’s butt and said he was proud of Yuuri and that he _believed_ in him. He’s known this since Tokyo, of course, but it’s still hard to hold the thought of Poodle and Victor as the same person together in his head. 

“Is that what we did in Sochi?” he says, uncertain.

“You really don’t remember?” Victor tugs the glove back on, finger by careful finger, and Yuuri has to look up at the watching faces of the statues, because something about that image brings up thoughts that are totally unsuitable for thinking in a seven hundred-year-old cathedral. Victor’s Eros program has done something to his brain. He doesn’t even know if that’s what Victor wants from this—from him—

“No, I, uh.” The splotchy blush is back. “I don’t remember anything after the first glass of champagne. I know there was a dance-off, and pole-dancing? But that, uh. That’s it?”

For a moment, Victor seems to be staring at something far away, but then he shakes his head and smiles again. “We’ll just have to do our best to relive it then, won’t we?” He extends a hand. Yuuri takes it, tentative, and lets Victor tow him outside. 

Compared to the candlelight glow inside the cathedral, even the dusk-touched sun is dazzling. “This way?” Victor says, pointing randomly at one of the alleys that splits off the broad plaza. 

Yuuri glances around for Yuri Plisetsky—he’d been leaning against a lamp standard out here when Yuuri went into the cathedral—but there’s no sign of him in the tourist throng. “Oh!” he says, suddenly reminded of what he was doing when Yuri knocked on the door of his hotel room. “Mari and Minako—they were supposed to come by my room when they arrived—” 

“Oh, you have to go somewhere?” Victor lets go of his hand, and Yuuri resists the urge to reach out again. “That’s okay, Yuuri! We can do this another time …” 

“No! No, I want to—I want to … I’ll just send a few texts. Just a minute?”

 **Katsuki Yuuri**  
I’m really sorry but something’s come up 5:24 PM  
will you two be okay tonight without me? 5:25 PM

 _No problem,_ Mari texts back. _We ran into your coach in the hotel bar. He and Minako are getting along pretty well so I think we’ve got our entertainment for the night …_

Minako and Celestino? With alcohol? _Celestino might need someone to keep an eye on him tonight,_ he texts to Phichit. _Apparently he’s at the hotel bar with my sister and ballet teacher_.

 **Phichit**  
sounds hilarious, count me in 5:26 PM  
what about you though? I thought we were all going to go for dinner 5:26 PM

 **Katsuki Yuuri**  
I’m with Victor 5:26 PM

 **Phichit**  
what 5:26 PM  
WHAT 5:27 PM  
so I guess Plisetsky convinced you? Yuuri you have to tell me everything 5:27 PM  
no wait forget it, I’m a good friend, you can tell me everything in the morning 5:27 PM  
am I going to have the room to myself tonight 😜😜😜 5:28 PM

Yuuri glances over at Victor, who is scrolling on his own phone. _I don’t know_ , he admits. _I don’t know if he wants anything like that. I don’t really know anything right now?_

_Okay well good luck 🔥_

“Um. I’m ready?” he says, pocketing his phone. Victor immediately tucks his own phone away and flings an arm around Yuuri’s shoulders. Maybe this is a European thing, Yuuri thinks, as they cross the plaza. Maybe he’s just a tactile person. 

“I’ve been wondering, Yuuri. Who did you think I was?” Victor asks. 

When he glances up, Victor is smiling, hair falling forward over one eye. There’s a queasy familiarity to it, the Victor he knows from posters and television mixing with some strange sense of the person he only knows from texts. “Do you really want to know?” 

“Of course I want to know. I want to know everything,” Victor says. _Me too_ , Yuuri thinks. There are so many things about Victor that he doesn’t know, so many things he wants to know. Too many unknowns; too many uncharted lands on the map. Most of all he wants to know whether the connection they had—whatever it was, whatever Victor thought it was—is still there. If it was _real_. That’s not exactly something he can just ask, though. 

_Did you like me? I thought you did, but now I don’t know. Did you feel like we had something special, or was it just a fun conversation for you? A distraction? A challenge? And now—what is this? Where are we?_

Impossible questions; forbidden territory. He clears his throat and shrugs. “I thought you were Pavel Karev. Probably you’d, uh, guessed that one. Or maybe Konstantin Barakov.”

The alley narrows, and Victor presses closer, arm dropping to curl around Yuuri’s waist. Without the weight of Victor’s arm to hold them down, his shoulders creep nervously up towards his ears. Yuuri makes a concerted attempt to drag them back, and mostly fails. “I don’t understand, Yuuri. Why did you think it wasn’t me? I fit the profile, didn’t I?”

“Well—the phone call? During Nationals. That wasn’t your voice. I would recognize your voice.” 

“Would you?” Victor looks delighted. 

“Of course,” he mutters, flushing. “I mean, I’ve been watching you skate forever, I have a bunch of posters of you—”

“Seventeen of them! You told me.”

Yuuri stumbles on the cobblestone, avoiding a fall only by dint of Victor’s fingers clutching at his coat. “Thanks,” he mutters. Apparently the champagne in Sochi had opened his mouth and let out all his embarrassing secrets. “Uh, well. Yeah. Yes. I would recognize your voice.”

“The phone call was an accident,” Victor says. “Georgi was taking a picture of me with Yurio—I wanted to show it to you—and then he answered when you called.” 

“Oh. That makes sense.” 

“Was that it? Just the phone call?” They turn a corner, into a lane where palm trees flutter in the gaps between buildings. A man, smoking, is leaning out an upper-storey window, chatting animatedly with a woman on the other side of the lane.

“No. Not just that.” He hesitates, then lets it out. The words seem to clatter off the looming stone walls.“Poodle—you, I mean—said you’d been watching me skate since Rostelecom in 2014? And I just didn’t think—I mean, in Sochi, you asked me if I wanted to take a photo with you. Like I was just another fan. Like you had no idea who I was.”

“Yuuri!” Victor says, palm to face. “I wanted to take a picture with you! And we’d never spoken before—you didn’t talk to me once during that entire Final, Yuuri, not until the banquet—so I couldn’t really say _oh hello Yuuri, how are you, can we snap a selfie?_ ” 

“I couldn’t talk to _you_! You’re you, and I’m … ” Yuuri waves one hand up at Victor, who scrunches up his nose, like he’s confused. He must know, though. He must know that he’s Victor Nikiforov, and Yuuri is the guy with his posters on the wall. He wonders whether he would have talked to Poodle in the same way if he’d actually known who he was talking to. Probably he would have let the conversation die in an implosion of social anxiety. “Oh, god. Phichit’s going to be so full of himself now. That’s exactly what he said you were thinking. He was convinced Poodle was you.” 

“You really called me Poodle?” This, too, seems to render Victor into a human version of the heart-eyes emoji.

“That’s what it said in my phone. I didn’t have another name!” 

Victor laughs, and leads him around another corner. 

The Gothic Quarter is a labyrinth, narrow stone alleys twisting between grand medieval buildings that take on a patina of burnished gold in the early twilight. Victor chooses a path at random, guiding Yuuri through low archways of unworked stone and past wooden doors with knockers carved into the shape of strange faces, under wrought-iron balconies packed with plants in precariously-balanced pots, into dead ends and out again. The lanes smell of cigarettes, of cumin and smoked ham. Somewhere, just out of sight, a man is singing, something sentimental and yearning, accompanied on a guitar. No matter how often they turn, though, they never seem to get closer to the source of the song. 

“Where is he?” Victor says, enchanted. “It’s like he doesn’t really exist. Do you think it’s magic, Yuuri? Are we being lured to our doom by the man on the guitar?” 

Yuuri thinks he might go willingly into a surreal, never-ending maze, if only Victor came with him. 

They talk, in fits and starts; about the little shops they pass that sell jewellery or pastries or clothes, about skating, about family and home. “Hasetsu was exactly how I remembered it, and also totally different,” Yuuri says, when Victor asks about his time back in Kyushu. “Maybe I was what was different? But I still fit, there.” He talks, haltingly, about the pleasure of soaking in the onsen, about skating at Ice Castle with the triplets and Minami. Victor talks about helping Yuri Plisetsky with his short program, taking him to the banya to soak in the steam after their practices.

“Why do you call him that?” Yuuri asks, confused. It’s not a Russian naming pattern he’s familiar with—Yakov Feltsman seems to call Yuri Plisetsky _Yuratchka_ —but Victor consistently calls the teenager _Yurio_.

“You gave him that nickname, when we were in Sochi! Apparently he told you there wasn’t room for two Yuris in the senior division, and then after he lost the dance-off you said that in that case, he had to be Yurio.” 

Sometimes they’re both silent for the length of an alley, and the uncertainty of it gnaws at Yuuri again: the question of whether this is working, whether whatever-it-was is still there, whether Victor is surprised or disappointed by Yuuri in real life. He glances over at Victor, caught in the glow of one of the overhanging iron lanterns, his smile ticking up at the edge, excited, like it’s going to spill over. He talks in exclamation marks, Yuuri thinks. Victor was exactly and entirely himself, all through their hundreds of messages. 

A corner opens onto a sprawling plaza, filled with people laughing beneath red umbrellas and hundreds of scooters packed along the edges. A man and a woman are kissing in the deep shadows of a fig tree. Victor pulls Yuuri in closer, murmurs in his ear: “Yuuri. You never did tell me about your ex-lovers, when I asked …”

There had been a text exchange with Poodle about that; Yuuri had ducked the conversation, worried that any questions he asked in return would give away his secret. “I … there’s not a lot to tell,” he mutters, flustered. Maybe Victor’s just curious. It’s a common enough thing to talk about, in the skating world. Instead of answering, he ducks into a little cafe and comes out with sprinkled-sugar xuxo, and Victor’s eyes grow wide and he forgets to press the question. He gets sugar on the tip of his nose and sneezes three times before Yuuri, daring, reaches up to wipe it off. 

“You can really eat anything, huh.”

“Not all the time, of course, but a treat is okay, Yuuri! Can’t you?”

“No. I have to watch my diet when I’m competing. The rule when I was growing up was that I could only have katsudon if I won.” 

“Oh,” Victor says, nodding. “That explains it. In Sochi you said that if we found some, you weren’t allowed to have it, but that I could.” 

“Yurio said you took him to a Japanese restaurant? In St. Petersburg?” 

“Yes! Their katsudon is so good! Amazing, my favourite! But I can’t really say that, can I? I haven’t tried your mother’s katsudon yet, Yuuri. Would she make it for me?”

“Of course she’d make it for you,” Yuuri says. He can’t quite imagine what it would be like to have Victor, beautiful and larger-than-life, in Hasetsu. He would fill all the space, force it to expand, fill it again. Yuuri pictures Victor, coming home with him in the summer, teaching the Snow Rabbits how to glide, critiquing the triplets’ spins. An impossible dream, this morning, and now—well, still impossible, probably. “She would love that.” 

Night encloses the city in its hand, cupping it in darkness. 

“Where are we going?” Yuuri asks, as they wander around another corner. He thinks they might have come in a circle, back to an alley he recognizes: the red splotch of graffiti across one of the garage doors is familiar. “Do you know where we are?”

“No,” Victor says, with a shrug. “Isn’t it nice?”

A journey, Yuuri thinks. This—their rambling path through the Gothic Quarter—is a cartography, rendered in careful footsteps, in conversation. They tread over the past, marking points on a shared map.

“You never talked about Makkachin,” Yuuri says. “That was one of the things that made me think … well, you know.”

“I thought you were maybe still sensitive, Yuuri. About Vicchan, I mean. You didn’t tell us that he’d died, while we were in Sochi, you know that? I didn’t find out until Nationals, and then I felt terrible about choosing that nickname. So I didn’t talk about Makka, just in case.” 

And: “With _Chris Giacometti_? On the pole? Oh, no. His text … I didn’t answer! I thought he was an asshole. What else? What else did I do?”

And: “But _your_ butt should have been ranked first!” He covers his face, flushed, while Victor laughs.

“Absolutely not,” he says, almost purring. “Yuuri, your ass is sublime. The Canadian has a blinchiki ass, I told you this, right? And you have a vatrushka ass.”

“What?” 

“You know, Yuuri!” Victor says, waving his hands in an approximation of a rounded dome. “Like this. Very tasty.” 

“Oh _god_. Victor, no—”

It feels like there are places they aren’t ready to go, though: the quad axel, Tokyo, what happened afterwards. Any time the conversation passes by those topics, they take the long route around. 

“My body hurts more, every year. I was actually thinking about retiring, last season,” Victor says, at one point, after Yuuri mentions the difficulty of coming back from his injury at what, for a skater, is considered an advanced age. “Before …” he trails off. Yuuri doesn’t ask what comes next. 

“I’m hungry,” he says, instead. 

“Let’s find something to eat, then!”

They manage to get a seat inside a tiny tapas bar, pressed knee-to-knee. Victor shows off his Spanish comprehension by ordering a platter of toastas and some croquetas, and then makes a startled face when he bites into the first croqueta and finds it filled with squid ink. 

“You didn’t mean to order that, did you?” Yuuri says, laughing. “You wanted ham.” 

“Yuuuuuri! Don’t make fun of me,” Victor pouts, and he sounds so much like a Poodle text come to life that Yuuri almost falls off his chair. What a strange world this is: Victor Nikiforov, Living Legend, is also the same Victor who admitted to puking on his own exhibition costume and who yells _Vkusno!_ in a bright, happy voice whenever he eats something he likes. 

“That reminds me,” Yuuri says, when he catches his balance again. “Didn’t you promise to tell me your really terrible banquet story when we met in person?” 

“No,” Victor says, immediately shaking his head. He appears to be blushing. “Absolutely not, Yuuri. Not in public! I never should have mentioned it, I don’t know what I was thinking …” 

“Later, then? In private?” 

Victor shuts him up by feeding Yuuri a tomato-and-ricotta toasta with his fingers. Yuuri, battling down a blush the shade of the tomato, can’t quite decide who won the exchange. 

After Victor finishes eating, he leans back against the stone wall of the restaurant and closes his eyes, like he’s sleepy. He might be; it’s late, measured by St. Petersburg time. Yuuri, whose body still thinks it’s mid-afternoon—funny, he thinks, that they can still be separated in time, even when they’re in the same city—wonders what Victor might look like when he’s sleeping. Peaceful, maybe. Unguarded. 

“This is nice,” Victor says, without opening his eyes. “It’s nice to talk to you in person again, Yuuri. I spent so long, while we were texting, wondering if I was the person you wanted me to be. I didn’t know if you wanted me to be your coach, or a father figure, or a friend, or a lover …” Yuuri almost drowns in an overlarge sip of water, coughs through it. “I still don’t know who you want me to be, Yuuri.” 

“I just want you to be who you are,” he says. Victor’s eyes snap open, and, oh—he’s definitely not asleep, not anymore. His eyes are sparking, like he’s been plunged into the middle of an electrical storm. Yuuri swallows, uncertain. “That’s—that’s what I’ve always wanted?”

The lightning-bright shock of Victor’s attention softens, leaving nothing but a glimmer behind. He puts his hand on Yuuri’s where it rests on the table and squeezes. “That’s good, Yuuri. I think I can do that.” 

After they leave the restaurant, it feels like something shifts, like the forbidden spots on the map aren’t so dangerous anymore. Yuuri finds, as they wander beneath strands of shimmering lights in a Christmas market, that he isn’t choosing his words quite so carefully, that he doesn’t freeze in the circle of Victor’s arm whenever something comes up that might touch on Worlds, or Tokyo, or the words they’d shared, in the strange liminal space made of darkened Detroit and dawning St. Petersburg.

“You want to try, Yuuri?” Victor says, holding out a paper cup filled with mulled wine from one of the market vendors. 

“Oh—no. I don’t like to drink before a competition.” 

“Did I know that? I think maybe I knew that.” 

“I probably shouldn’t drink after, either,” he mutters, and Victor laughs. “Victor?”

“Hm?”

He presses forward, into the unknown. “You don’t regret meeting me in Sochi? Or that I texted you back? Because of … what happened afterwards. In Tokyo, I mean.” 

Victor wrinkles his nose and takes a sip of mulled wine before answering. “I regret what happened in Tokyo, Yuuri, but I don’t regret meeting you.”

“And you really didn’t hate me, afterwards? Yurio said you didn’t, but …”

“I didn’t hate you. I couldn’t hate you, Yuuri.”

“It would be okay if you did,” he says. “I mean—not that I want that—I just mean that I get it. I betrayed your trust. And then I made a mess of apologizing, too, when I met you outside the elevator. It would make sense, if you were angry.”

“I was embarrassed, Yuuri,” Victor says, looking away. “I didn’t mean for it to happen that way, not really—someone suggested we go to the rooftop bar and when I got there I thought, oh, if I invite Yuuri, maybe he’ll just walk right up to me and it will all be alright. I wasn’t entirely certain whether you knew who I was or not, you see. And then … well, you know what happened, Yuuri. And then, at the elevator. You said you wouldn’t have done it—talking to me—if you’d thought it was me.” 

“I’m so sorry,” Yuuri says, helpless. It feels like there’s no way to express exactly how sorry he is, nothing quite strong enough. “That wasn’t what I meant. I’m not very good with words when I’m nervous.” 

“Like your jumps, yes? You flub them when you have something on your mind,” Victor says, wry. “The same for apologies?” 

“Kind of,” he mumbles, and then stops. The flow of shoppers splits, spills around them. The apology—what he’d said to Phichit—hasn’t he spent months believing that there’s another way to send a message, another way to express how he feels? “Victor? We need to go back to the rink. There’s something I need to show you.”

###

The security guard at the little outdoor rink on L’Illa Diagonal has never heard of Victor Nikiforov. 

“Olympic gold?” Victor says, performing an elaborate pantomime of placing a medal around his neck. The man, whose English vocabulary appears to be limited to _Closed_ , shrugs. “Reigning Grand Prix champion? Yuuri! Why does this work whenever I don’t care, and then when I want to sneak you onto an ice rink at night, my name counts for nothing?” 

“The CCIB staff knew exactly who you were,” Yuuri says. They’d tried to get into the GPF venue after going back to the hotel for his skates, but after-hours access to the arena is tightly controlled. Yuuri had assumed, glum, that he’d have to abandon the idea, but Victor was insistent: _If you want to show me, Yuuri, I’ll find you ice._

“That’s my point!”

In the end, the security guard takes €200 from Victor, counts it carefully, and opens the gate to the ice. He holds up his hands, all the fingers extended, twice. _Not closed. Twenty minutes_. “I wish we’d come here when the Euro was weaker,” Victor grouses, while Yuuri laces up his skates, strips off his coat, and pockets his glasses. 

When he’s ready, he runs through a few warmup laps, spinning through the blue-white glow of the holiday lights that twinkle on the nearby arcade. There’s a strange thrum of anticipation, as if landing it now is more important, in some ways, than doing it in front of an audience of thousands. Here, in front of one person (two, if you count the security guard): this is the quad axel that matters. 

“Alright,” he says, when he feels sufficiently limber. Barcelona on a December night is warm enough that he’s not too uncomfortable in just a t-shirt and track pants. “Are you watching?” 

Victor, standing at the edge of the ice in his walking shoes, nods. “Of course I’m watching, Yuuri.” 

He hums the opening notes of the music for his free skate and flows through the first steps, deliberate, careful. The long, clean, entry, and then—holding his breath, the blue lights a blur—he comes down, hard, bouncing off his back edge and onto his butt, spinning sideways with the force of it. The security guard, who has come over to lean against the edge of the boards, lets out an audible hiss. 

“Yuuri! Yuuri, are you alright?” When he spins to a stop, Victor is on his knees on the ice beside him, staring down with a gaze so heavy that Yuuri thinks it could give him a concussion.

“I’m fine! I’m fine, that happens pretty often,” he manages. Victor holds out a hand and pulls him to his feet, tugging hard enough that Yuuri slides up against his chest. In skates, he’s closer to Victor’s height, their faces almost level. “I’ve gotten really good at falling over the last six months.” 

“You don’t have to do it, you know,” Victor says, brushing an aimless hand up over Yuuri’s shoulders, down to the damp patch on his hip. “Not now, and not during your free skate.”

“I know. I want to, though.” 

Victor presses one hand into the small of Yuuri’s back, thumb dipping into the space between t-shirt and waistband. Yuuri shivers, and allows his own hand to creep up the back of Victor’s shirt, beneath the black wool of his coat. He can feel Victor’s hipbone, sharp against his own, and the softer warmth where their thighs are pressed together. “How often are you landing it? In practice.”

“Maybe fifty percent?” Victor huffs out a breath, disbelieving. “Okay, forty. Thirty-five?” 

“Did you—were you thinking of me?” Victor asks, almost sounding shy. “When you first decided to do it?”

“A little. A lot. Yes. I wanted you to look at me.” 

“I was already looking at you, Yuuri.” The moment hangs between them, suspended in the air like a jump. Victor puts a hand on the back of his neck, warm. 

“I should try again—I really want you to see it. I mean, I know you saw the video, but—” Yuuri hesitates. “Did you watch the video?”

Victor tips his forehead against Yuuri’s. They’re so close. Victor’s lips are so close to his. “Yes. But I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know what you were trying to tell me.” 

“I meant—I meant it to say that you’d made your mark on me,” Yuuri whispers, and then Victor kisses him. 

His lips are warm and soft and a little chapped; when his mouth opens, Yuuri can taste cloves and cinnamon and oranges, the lingering flavour of mulled wine. He thinks, distantly, that it must look to the security guard like they’ve paid two hundred Euros for the privilege of kissing on an open-air ice rink. Maybe they have. Maybe that was always where this was going. 

“Yuuri?” Victor says, pulling back. “Yuuri, I …” He glances back at the guard, who is staring pointedly off into the distance. “This is maybe not the right place? For this.” 

Victor Nikiforov just _kissed_ him. Victor Nikiforov is going to kiss him again? But somewhere else. Is that what’s happening? “Um. Yeah?” 

“The hotel, I think?” 

Victor still hasn’t let go of his grip on Yuuri’s neck, which makes it exceptionally hard to think, but Yuuri manages to remember, blurry, that there was a reason he’d wanted to find a patch of clear ice. He reluctantly disentangles his hand from the inside of Victor’s coat. “Wait. I still want to show you. I don’t want to waste your €200 …” 

Victor mutters something that sounds like “It wasn’t a waste,” but he lets Yuuri go.

He takes a minute to warm up again, or maybe it’s really to cool down. A ghostly imprint of Victor’s lips lingers against his own; twice, as he loops the rink, Yuuri puts a finger up to touch his mouth, trying to catch the sensation before it disappears. “Okay,” he calls out. “Here we go.” 

This time, when he leaps, he can feel Victor’s eyes on him, lifting him up. This time, he touches down clean. He spins around and touches his other blade to the ice, after, but there it is. Messy, but real. A quad axel. 

The security guard claps, politely, and says “Muy bien,” in a bored tone that suggests he’s seen better from the skaters who flock to this rink every day. 

“Thank you,” Yuuri says, sketching a bow. When he skates back over to the boards, Victor is staring at him, eyes very wide. 

“Wonderful, Yuuri,” he says, his voice oddly strained. “I knew you could do it. Okay. The hotel, yes?”

###

The taxi ride back to the hotel seems to take forever. Victor is holding Yuuri’s hand, but otherwise he seems distant, his eyes on the window where the lights of Barcelona and the dark vault of the sea are flashing by. Yuuri, looking for a distraction from the buzz of his nerves, brings out his phone and scrolls through the messages he’s been ignoring for the last few hours.

 **Mari**  
hey otouto 7:43 PM  
just wondering, when you said “something came up” were you talking about Victor Nikiforov 7:43 PM

Yuuri sends a text back: _Did Phichit tell you?_

When he flicks over to Instagram, Phichit has posted a series of pictures: Celestino and Minako laughing over an enormous carafe of red wine, Phichit and Mari looking bemused, and then—after the carafe slowly empties in the background of the shots—Celestino and Minako attempting to dance the flamenco in the middle of a paella restaurant. “My coach and my ballet teacher are getting drunk together,” he offers, holding the phone out. Victor turns away from the window and peers down at the pictures. 

“They look like they’re having fun,” he says, with a chuckle. “Someone should invite Yurio—he loves a dance-off.”

 _Yeah, Phichit told me a very interesting story_ , Mari says. _I understand now why you couldn’t come out with us tonight …_

_I’m sorry! I’ll make it up to you tomorrow?_

_You’d better bring Victor to dinner_ , she replies. _*And* the rest of the senior men_. Yuuri glances over at Victor, who now has his head on the back of the seat, eyes closed, breathing slow. If not for the soft, repeated press of his thumb against Yuuri’s knuckles, there would be nothing to suggest he’s even awake. 

Yuuri takes a moment just to stare at him, the flash of his face revealed by the oscillating blink of the passing streetlights. All night he’s been looking up at Victor out of the corner of his eye, half-glances, looking away shyly when he finds Victor looking back. Now, taken head-on, Victor’s beauty is almost overwhelming: the silver sweep of his hair across his brow, the long straight line of his nose, the way his dark lashes rest against his cheek, fluttering. 

How strange, Yuuri thinks. He’s been looking at Victor for more than half his life, and it’s only now that he can see the tiny mole at the edge of Victor’s hairline, or the way his mouth, at rest, parts softly in a tiny O. 

_Sloppy. Your technique is terrible._ He exhales, hard, his hand jumping in Victor’s grip. 

“Alright, Yuuri?” Victor murmurs, eyes still closed. 

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m—I’m fine.” Totally fine. Just remembering all the criticisms the illusion of Victor Nikiforov had levelled at his masturbation skills, that’s all. In reality, Victor is too polite to say anything quite so crude as _we can’t all be world-class_ , but—Yuuri swallows, shivers—what if it’s awkward? What if they get back to the hotel room and Real Life Naked Victor Nikiforov says _Well, that was nice, Yuuri, but I don’t think we need to do it again_?

Worse: what if they get back to the hotel room, and Real Life Victor Nikiforov doesn’t have anything to say at all? What if this—this whatever, this thing between them—was always just in Yuuri’s imagination? 

The tide of his desire recedes, caught in the pull of a moon made of a thousand anxieties. Breathe. _Breathe_. He knows (because Phichit tells him, constantly) that he gets too snarled up in his own thoughts, too twisted in his own fears—that’s all this is. That’s all. Phichit would say—well, he doesn’t have to guess:

 **Katsuki Yuuri**  
what was that thing you said when I was nervous about going out with that guy 9:37 PM  
the tech guy from Stars on Ice, remember? 9:38 PM

 **Phichit**  
is this your way of saying that you’re nervous about getting naked with Victor 9:38 PM  
because, seriously: he clearly likes you 9:38 PM  
just let him like you, okay? you don’t have to think about all the reasons why you think he shouldn’t 9:38 PM

The silhouette of the Prince towers into view outside the taxi 

_Thanks, Phichit. I’ll try._ He slides the phone away before Phichit can answer. 

“Oh good, we’re here,” Victor says, as the cab pulls to a stop. He sounds chipper, but he fidgets as he pays for the cab, knee bouncing up and down, and avoids Yuuri’s eyes. 

The hotel elevator is packed. They have to jam into opposite corners, so that Yuuri doesn’t even have the grounding sense of Victor’s hand on his own. Without that tether, Yuuri feels like he’s been thrown back to the morning’s practice skate, stomach boiling with nerves at the thought of being on the same ice as Victor Nikiforov, two-time Olympic Champion. Without Victor touching him, it becomes easier and easier to believe that the last four hours—the kiss—were just a dream. He’s had dreams like this, thousands of times. 

He slides his glasses off and puts them into a pocket in his skate bag. The world softens around the edges, just on the edge of unreal. 

“Victor Nikiforov? It’s Victor Nikiforov!” one of the women by the door says. “Would you autograph my shirt?” 

Victor, surprisingly, doesn’t seem entirely pleased to meet a fan. He accepts a pen and scrawls a signature just below the back collar of the woman’s shirt, even though Yuuri thinks she probably wanted him to sign where it dips across her chest. “Where are you going now?” the woman says, fluttering her eyelashes. “We’re going up to the rooftop pool … you could join us …”

“Sorry! This is us,” Victor says, with a jaw-clenching smile, and rushes off when the door opens on the twenty-first floor. Yuuri follows in his wake, sluggish. 

It’s silly. He knows it’s silly. Victor had seemed into it, while they were kissing on the ice—“We don’t have to,” he says, as Victor pushes through the door to his darkened room and sheds his gloves and coat and shoes. “I mean, I don’t know what you were—um—but it’s fine? It’s fine—”

And then Victor has him pressed flat against the hard expanse of the door, one hand on his chest and the other tight on his waist. Yuuri drops his skate bag to the floor with a startled squeak. 

“Yuuri,” Victor says, trailing kisses down the tendon in his neck. In the hall behind them, there’s a muffled burst of laughter, passing voices. “Yuuri, thank god, that took so long—why are you still wearing your coat?” 

Yuuri shrugs the coat off automatically, slips out of his shoes, as if his body understands what’s happening even as his mind lags behind. It feels like he’s floating above himself, watching as Victor mouths over the line of his jaw, sucks on a spot just below his ear. “I thought I was going to die of waiting, Yuuri. I wanted so badly to touch you in the taxi, and then in the elevator …” 

When Victor leans back in, the evidence of this is obvious, the length of his cock pressing a hard line against Yuuri’s hip. 

“Oh,” Yuuri says, still confused. His palms splay flat against the wood of the door, sweaty, reaching for balance. Is that why Victor was so quiet, before? Because he wanted this? Tentative, he slides a thigh between Victor’s legs, presses it up to meet the roll of Victor’s hips. 

Victor groans and thrusts back against the crease of Yuuri’s leg. “Fuck, Yuuri, you’re so hot, so hot, I’ve wanted you for so long, I can’t—”

“Me? You wanted me?” Yuuri blurts out, embarrassingly high-pitched.

“Yes, Yuuri,” Victor says, pausing. In the darkness, his eyes are the uneasy blue of the sea at midnight. “You. I want you.” 

Oh. _Oh._ Victor wants this. Wants him. 

All at once, he’s aware of his entire body, in the strange way he sometimes is when he’s skating: the muscles in his back shifting against the door, Victor’s fingers digging in under his ribs, his toes pushing into the floor through the wool of his socks. A bruise on his hip, from a fall in practice a few days ago. The urge to taste Victor’s mouth again, like an ache in his jaw.

His cock, beginning to strain against his track pants, almost painful. 

Victor _wants_ him. 

The thought lights a fire, low in his belly, and burns up into his throat. He lets his hands drag down to Victor’s ass. He gets to do this, he thinks. To touch, to want. “Kiss me?”

The kiss is hungry, tongues sliding together. Victor’s mouth is so hot against his. 

“Of course I want you,” Victor says, in the breath between kisses. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you, Yuuri, after Sochi—ah, yes, ah”—this as Yuuri traces his tongue down from Victor’s ear, inhaling a stinging burst of cologne at the hinge of his jaw. He bites down, soft, not enough to leave a mark. No marks, not before they have to skate, but he thinks he would like to leave the pattern of his teeth on Victor’s collarbone, climbing up his neck. “Oh, fuck, Yuuri—do that—yes—that again, harder, I want …” 

“You want me,” Yuuri says, more confident in it. A statement, not a question. Suddenly, he can’t seem to stop touching Victor, hands making a catalogue of all his parts: the shell of his ear and the spot where his hip curves into his ass and the slight rasp of stubble on his cheek. Victor, in three dimensions. “You _want_ me.” 

“So much, Yuuri. I watch videos of you skating, and then I touch myself—” Victor rocks against the tensed muscles in Yuuri’s thigh. “Is that too much? Should I not tell you this?”

“No,” Yuuri gasps. He squirms against Victor, chasing friction, pushing into the hand that Victor trails down the front of his pants. The fabric is light, so light that he can feel the warmth of Victor’s palm against his cock. “No. Tell me. I want you to tell me. I want to think of you fucking your hand, and thinking of me.” 

“Yuuri,” Victor says. He sounds winded. Sounds lost. He tugs at Yuuri, trembling, like he thinks they can get closer than two people who are already pressed full-body together against a door. “ _Yuuri_. We can’t—I can’t keep doing this, Yuuri, I’m not going to last. The bed—the bed, we can make it to the _bed_ , can’t we?” 

On the bed, things get hazy for a while, legs tangling as they kiss. Victor kisses like he skates: Yuuri can feel it all the way from the crown of his head to the base of his spine. He feels almost drunk with wanting; it brings a strange sense of looseness, of freedom, like he can do anything at all and it will be the right thing, and maybe that’s true because apparently the last time he was drunk he dragged Victor Nikiforov out into the darkness of Sochi by one hand.

He pushes one hand up the front of Victor’s shirt and the other up the back, letting the soft cotton ruck up on his forearm as he tries to drink the heat of Victor’s skin through his fingertips. So long spent looking at the open back on 2014 World Free Skate Victor’s costume and now he can dig his fingers into Victor’s shoulder blade, the hard reality of it. 

“Yuuri,” Victor says, rolling up to straddle him. His adductors flex against Yuuri’s hips, almost too tight. “Did you want me, too? When we were texting? Afterwards?” In the dim light off the Barcelona skyline, he looks younger, almost bashful. 

Of course, Yuuri wants to say. Isn’t it obvious? But maybe it’s not. Maybe Victor doesn’t know where they are, either. Maybe he’s just trying to find his way without a map.

“I—the posters? You remember I said I had your posters?” Victor makes a breathy sound of agreement. “I looked at them. When I was—” 

He can’t quite say it, but Victor drops his head to Yuuri’s shoulder with a moan. “And your Eros program? Afterwards I always, uh. It’s so hot. That red shirt? I want to suck on your nipples through that shirt.” 

“Yuuri,” Victor whines. “I have to _skate_ that program tomorrow. What are you doing to me?” He paws at Yuuri’s waistband, fingers catching in the elastic, nails scraping thin lines of heat across Yuuri’s stomach. 

Victor is going to touch him, he realizes. He’s going to find out what Victor’s hand feels like, wrapped around him—not the long-imagined weight of it, but the real thing. “Naked,” Yuuri manages. He wants to see all of Victor. “Um. Can we be naked?”

They should be good at this—better at this. Between them, they have decades of experience stripping off sweaty spandex in little changerooms, and this is t-shirts, track pants; no buttons, no zips, no sequins. There seem to be too many hands, everything moving in too many directions at once. There are distractions: Victor’s tongue on his collarbone, his hand on the glorious strength of Victor’s abs, legs flexing up into impossible positions in a bad mimicry of ice dancing. 

It’s funny, Yuuri thinks. Funny that they keep knocking elbows, getting twisted up in the wrong ends of each other’s sleeves. Yuuri spent so long imagining being in the same place as Poodle, finally able to touch, and now they’re here in the same hotel room and they’re touching too much to get undressed. 

“Your shirt—” he mutters, trying to tug it over Victor’s head, while Victor fumbles at his pants.

“Lift your hips, Yuuri, you need to lift your hips,” he says, a little bossy, as if he’s in the middle of critiquing Yuuri’s entry into a quad flip. “Why aren’t you lifting your hips?” 

“I can’t,” Yuuri points out. “You’re sitting on me.” 

“Always blame problems on the choreography, yes?” Victor says, with a laugh. He pulls his own shirt off, flings it away. When his arms go up Yuuri can see that he shaves his armpits—maybe waxes them—but there’s a faint gleaming line of hair leading down from his bellybutton. “Okay, Yuuri, here. Here—” 

He shifts back and Yuuri lifts his hips and somehow between them they get most of the clothes off. Victor makes a show of pulling down Yuuri’s briefs with his teeth, nose cold against his iliac crest. It’s just such an entirely Victor thing to do that Yuuri can’t help but laugh. 

“Victor! That tickles!” He pushes a hand down into Victor’s hair, trying to hurry him up, and Victor’s cheek bumps against his cock, breath ghosting over the base. Oh _fuck_. Suddenly Yuuri’s a thousand miles from laughing. “Ah—never mind—that’s good, that’s, ah—” 

Instead of touching Yuuri’s cock, Victor begins to trail slow, wet kisses down the inside of his thigh. Every kiss feels like a bruise blooming under his skin: tender, lingering. Yuuri has to wrap a hand around himself to contain the bright jagged feeling pooling in his stomach. 

“Victor … Victor, I—” he says, something like a whimper. 

“Alright, Yuuri?” Victor says, glancing up. “Does it hurt?” 

“Hurt?” He begins to stroke, slow, thumb just skimming the head. 

Victor runs a gentle hand along the outside of his knee, down to his ankle, over the arch of his bare foot. “Your leg. The injury—it doesn’t hurt?”

“Oh. No, it’s alright—it’s—it doesn’t hurt anymore.”

“I worried about you, Yuuri.” Victor draws one finger over the curve of Yuuri’s ankle, ducks to touch his lips to the same spot. Softly; so softly. “I thought about you being in pain and I couldn’t—I couldn’t do anything about it.” 

Yuuri blinks up at Victor, kneeling between his legs: one white sock still on, cock curved and flush against his belly, hair stuck to his forehead with sweat. 

Oh, Yuuri thinks. He’s _here_. Victor’s here. All of this is _real_. 

A flash of desire jolts through him, sharp as a muscle cramp. 

“Fuck.” His lungs are fighting for air. “Oh, fuck, Victor—I wish you could fuck me. I want you to fuck me.” He slides a hand up Victor’s thigh and gets a grip on Victor’s long, slender cock. It’s damp against his palm, leaking. “I want you inside me.” 

“We can’t, Yuuri,” Victor groans. He licks his hand and wraps it around Yuuri’s cock, and that’s—oh. Oh. It feels tight and new and somehow entirely familiar. Exactly like he imagined and nothing like it at all, a tight hot wet slide that drags his hips up, chasing more. “Not before you have to skate.”

They’re both stroking each other, now, off-rhythm, bumping knuckles. It’s messy. It’s perfect. “Later,” Victor says. “We can—later, Yuuri, okay? After—”

 _Later_. There will be a later. An after. He thinks he might like to feel the phantom ache of Victor’s cock while he’s skating, later. Still: later is good, it’s a good thought, but they’ve spent so long in different places, worlds apart. He wants to feel the weight of Victor, the crashing reality of him. “I want to feel you,” he says, kicking his legs up and wrapping them around Victor’s back, heels drawing him down. “Come closer. I want to know you’re here—that we’re here together—”

Victor makes a hungry noise deep in the back of his throat and surges against him, fumbling their cocks together so he can stroke both at once. He tries for a kiss, misses, grazes Yuuri’s lip with his teeth. Yuuri presses his hand between them, wraps it together with Victor’s long fingers. Everything sharpens to an edge, scoring through him: Victor, gazing down through his lashes, like he can’t stand to look away; Victor’s pre-come mixing with his own, slick and hot. The wet slide of their hands. Sweat dripping off Victor’s forehead. The bright tang of salt on Yuuri’s tongue. He’s forgotten how to swallow; there’s spit pooling in his mouth. 

The pressure is building, fast, so fast. He feels like a lit firework, suspended in the moment before it ignites. He wants—he _wants_ —and finally, finally, what he wants is right here. “Oh—Victor, fuck, I’m—”

He can’t feel his feet anymore. Everything is obliterated. 

“Yuuri,” Victor says, breathless. His hand is still moving urgently on both their cocks, pressing Yuuri toward shuddering oversensitivity. The aftershocks of his orgasm pulse through his veins, like a ragged heartbeat. “Yuuri, I—” and then Victor says something frantic in Russian and gasps and shakes apart, coming in hot stripes all over Yuuri’s stomach. 

For a long time—minutes, hours, years, Yuuri doesn’t know—they lie like that, Victor collapsed in the cradle of Yuuri’s thighs, their softening cocks pressed together. It feels strangely intimate. 

Finally, Yuuri rouses himself enough to mutter, “We’re sticky, Victor.” He tries to shift Victor off, but his bones are liquid. His toes still feel very far away. “We’re going to stick together.” 

“Good,” Victor grunts, wiggling an arm behind Yuuri’s neck. “I want to stick to you.” 

There’s a silence. Yuuri inhales the sharp chlorinated scent of sex, and reaches up to join his fingers with Victor’s. The feeling of come drying between them isn’t particularly comfortable, but it’s nice to know that Victor’s not going anywhere. 

“Yuuri. Why didn’t you think I wanted you?” Victor murmurs, lips against his ear. 

“I … I don’t have a lot of experience,” Yuuri says, glad for the dim lighting. It’s harder to talk about these things, now that they’re not—not fucking, exactly, but whatever people would call what just happened. “And you—you’re amazing, gorgeous. You could have anyone you wanted. So many people want you … and for me, usually—this sort of thing—well. It doesn’t happen to me.”

“It doesn’t happen to me, either, Yuuri,” Victor says. Yuuri makes a little sound of disbelief. Victor shrugs, chest shifting slightly against Yuuri’s. “I mean, yes, not that I don’t have … Well. I mean that usually I’m not having sex with people I have feelings for.” 

Yuuri lets his eyes close, cards a hand through Victor’s hair. He thinks of how he woke up this morning, still thinking Victor didn’t care, and now—now he’s lying in Victor’s arms. He’s lying here with Victor Nikiforov: yes, the legendary skater, but also just Victor, who was trembling with nerves in the cathedral, who spent €200 to watch Yuuri skate for fifteen seconds, who apparently has an ass-ranking system based on Russian pastries. 

Victor, who has _feelings_ for him. Who opened up to Yuuri over months and months of texts and then thought Yuuri was rejecting him. At the time, he’d thought of Victor as angry; as hurt, yes, but in a blunt way, hardened. Now he thinks Victor might be much softer than he seems: all hidden underbelly, the muscle and shine of him masking how easy it is to cut him open. 

“Victor?” he says. Victor hums an acknowledgement against his cheek. “Yurio said … he said I made you sad. After Tokyo. Is that … was that true?”

“Yuuri,” Victor says, surprised, as if Yuuri should already know the answer to this question. “Yuuri, you didn’t make me sad. You broke my heart.” 

Victor, who has spent the last nine months thinking Yuuri _doesn’t love him_ —

“Victor. Victor, I—” he says, just as Victor says, “After Worlds. Come to St. Petersburg with me?”

Yuuri’s breath catches in his chest, his hand in Victor’s hair stilling. “No, I know, too much,” Victor says, hurriedly. “I know you asked me to be your coach, but—”

“I—what?” He forces his lungs to start working again. 

“Oh. In Sochi. At the banquet. Of course you don’t remember, Yuuri, I keep forgetting.” 

He wants to say _Yes_ , or maybe _Come to Hasetsu with me._ Phichit has been talking all season about wanting to move his home rink back to Thailand, and Yuuri thinks Celestino would go, if it wasn’t for Yuuri. He thinks Phichit would like him to come, too, but Yuuri has other dreams. He dreams about the clouds scudding over the beach in Hasetsu and he dreams about running up the steps to the castle and maybe, if he’s honest, he dreams of looking up to see Victor standing at the top. 

St. Petersburg, though—that could work, too. He can imagine going to the banya with Victor, walking together along the bridges under watery spring sunlight. “You’d want—I mean. Coaching?”

“I told you, Yuuri, I was thinking of retiring last season,” Victor says. “And I didn’t, because I thought I had something to prove, after Worlds, but no matter what happens—after this season, I’m done. And I think I would like coaching. That was one of the things I realized, after what happened in Tokyo, after I got over being mad at myself.” 

“At _yourself_?”

“Well I _was_ mad at you for a while, Yuuri.” He chuckles, softly. “But mostly at myself, yes. I thought I’d been a fool, opening up so much. That it was a mistake to think I could really connect with someone.” A little _ah_ of distress slips out of Yuuri’s mouth, and Victor puts a gentle hand on his cheek. 

“Yuuri, no, wait, listen. I’m not done. After, I went back and looked at our conversations, and I stopped feeling that way. I missed you, yes, I wished very badly that things had ended another way, but I wasn’t mad, because you changed things for me. Changed the way I was living my life. I tried to spend more time with Makka, this season, and I let more people in. Yurio, you know? And I tried to find more things I enjoyed that weren’t just skating. I thought a lot about what I was doing and why I was doing, it and how I didn’t want to spend my life starting over ever season. So, I thought—coaching—especially if it was you, Yuuri. I know, you have a coach already—it’s too much, too soon—”

There’s liquid gold running through his veins. Yuuri thinks Victor must be able to see it, the way the glow spills out of him, incandescent in the dark of the room. “Victor,” he says. He’s breathing like he’s just finished his free skate. “It’s not too much. That’s—I’d like that. I’d like that?” 

“Really?” Victor lifts up, onto his palms, so that he’s suspended over Yuuri. His stomach unsticks from Yuuri’s with a faint _pop_. “Really?” 

“Really.” 

Victor kisses his forehead, softly, and then flops down on the bed again. “Okay, Yuuri. Enough emotion for one day, yes? We need our sleep for tomorrow.” 

“Tomorrow?” Yuuri says, with a yawn. He _is_ tired. It’s hard to remember what day it is, exactly. “Oh, the short program.” 

“Yes. The short program,” Victor says, amused. He curls around Yuuri, anchoring him to the mattress by draping one leg across his waist. “Go to sleep, Yuuri.”

###

**Barcelona, Spain  
Thursday, December 8, 2016  
ISU Grand Prix Final, Men’s Short Program**

“That was good,” Yuuri says, reluctantly, as JJ takes a bow at the end of his short program. “He’s so consistent.” 

“Yeah, another one that’s going to beat you, Katsudon,” Yurio says, sourly, from the seat in the upper row where he’d plunked down after finishing his own short program. Yurio’s score was good—he’s leading, right now, just a bit ahead of Otabek Altin, and a solid ten points up on Yuuri—but he seems annoyed about it anyway. Yuuri thinks annoyed may just be Yurio’s baseline mood, though.

“He’s not going to beat Victor,” Mila Babicheva says. “Victor’s short program is …” she shrugs, and Sara Crispino, further down the row of skaters, says, “ _So hot_ ,” and both of them laugh. Michele Crispino, sitting at the end of the row, grumbles something into his hands, but doesn’t complain beyond that. 

“Ugh, shut up,” Yurio mutters, and plops his feet onto the top edge of Yuuri’s seat. His red animal print sneakers are right up in Yuuri’s face, smelling vaguely of canvas and sock-feet. “It’s not _that_ good. Victor did a better job choreographing my program than he did for himself.” 

Christophe Giacometti, fresh off crutches, grins lazily. He seems to be enjoying the experience of watching the Final without the pressure of skating in it, if his banter from the sidelines during the morning’s public practice is any indication. “Oh, I don’t know. I think Victor’s program does _exactly_ what it’s designed to do.”

“What’s it designed to do?” Otabek Altin asks, sliding into the seat beside Yurio. 

There’d been some sort of furor on social media about Otabek and Yurio on Wednesday night, but Yuuri isn’t sure exactly what happened. Phichit had tried to explain it to him during the practice this morning, but Yuuri hadn’t really been listening. Skating on the same ice as Victor after waking up in his bed—after waking up naked and wrapped in his arms—well, it hadn’t been any easier than the practice the day before, when he’d felt like he might throw up if Victor said anything to him. Victor had run through his Eros program while Yuuri could literally still feel the imprint of Victor’s fingers on his thighs, and _then_ he’d draped himself over Yuuri’s shoulders and whispered something filthy about blowjobs in the changeroom. 

“Oh,” Yuuri had said, casual. He might be destined to lose to Victor in the Final itself, but he was _not_ going to lose in a war of sexual one-upmanship during public practice. “Is that what you’ve fantasized about? Sometimes I like to think about pushing you up against the boards and eating you out until you can’t stand up anymore.”

Victor had gone as red as his short program costume, and Yakov had yelled _Keep your skaters under control, Cialdini!_ at Celestino.

Anyway, Yuuri thinks he can be forgiven for being a little distracted this morning. Whatever happened, Otabek and Yurio seem to be friends now. 

“Well …” Chris looks over at Phichit, who raises his eyebrows, and then both of them shrug in Yuuri’s direction. “It’s targeted,” Chris explains. 

“Like a heat-seeking missile,” Phichit agrees. 

Yuuri covers his face with one hand, while Mila laughs uproariously. “It took long enough to work, though,” she says, when she finally stops. “I thought they’d started dating, like, a year ago.” 

“Who’s dating who?” Michele asks, puzzled, just as the score comes over the loudspeaker: “The score for Jean-Jacques Leroy of Canada is 112.97.”

Phichit whistles. “Impressive. That’ll be hard to beat.” 

“He’s overrated,” Yurio mutters, just as Yuuri says, “Victor can do it, though. He’ll definitely do it.” 

“Hey. Where do I find a boyfriend who’s also my cheerleading squad?” Chris says, with an exaggerated pout. “I got naked and pole-danced at the banquet last year too, you know. Why am I still single?” 

“Boyfriend?” Michele says, sounding even more confused. The rest of them turn their attention back to the ice, where Victor is circling the rink, acknowledging the applause before his program begins. The wind of his passage blows the deep vee of his red silk shirt wide, and Yuuri swallows audibly. This, too, is much worse now that he’s seen Victor naked. 

“Oooh, Yuuri, he’s looking over here,” Phichit says, grabbing him by the arm. Phichit is having way too much fun with this, has been ever since Yuuri crept back into their hotel room in the morning to change. 

“So? What’s going on?” Phichit said, still in bed. “You apologized, obviously. He doesn’t hate you, obviously.”

“No. He doesn’t hate me. He, uh. He—”

“Yuuri, I told you so—I _told you so_ —” 

It’s been like that all day. He and Victor went out for lunch with Mari and Minako and Phichit after the public practice, and Victor pretended not to notice as the other three giggled and gave Yuuri congratulatory pats on the back and asked, slyly, whether the beds were more comfortable on the twenty-first floor. (That last one was just Phichit, although Mari raised an eyebrow at it.) 

“He’s winking at you, Yuuri!” Phichit says, as the opening notes of Eros ring out on the guitar.

“No he’s not,” Yurio mutters, and then Otabek says, “Yes, he is.” 

“Why are _you_ participating in this?” Yurio hisses. 

“I don’t know,” Otabek says, calm. “It’s kind of cute. I thought you said you helped them get together?”

“Ugh! I did not. I never said that.” On the ice, Victor executes his combination perfectly and slides into the choreographic sequence. 

Yuuri’s own short program had gone fine: no major mistakes. Not quite a personal best, but close. Celestino had been pleased. “Very good, Yuuri, especially considering that you’ve been more focussed on your free skate this season,” he’d said, while they sat in the Kiss and Cry. “On one particular element of it, at least. Once you’ve got that out of your system, we’ll see if we can take this program to the next level for Worlds.” 

Yuuri, thinking of Victor’s offer to coach him next season, had leaned in to hug Celestino. “Thanks, Celestino. For everything.” 

The free skate—he’s definitely not thinking about the free skate right now. He doesn’t have to think about the free skate yet. He’s just sitting here, watching his—boyfriend?—skate, and then afterwards they’ll go out for dinner and go back to Victor’s room, which seems to be Yuuri’s room as well now, and that will help with not thinking about the free skate. Easy. Anytime he thinks about the free skate and the jump that starts it off, he’ll just start composing a sternly-worded letter to the author of “Top Ten Butts in Men’s Figure Skating”: _I write to let you know that, having done some personal research on the subject, it is an objective fact that you have severely under-ranked Victor Nikiforov’s butt. It is firm and perfectly rounded and when I put my hand there and dig in with my thumb Victor makes a noise that—_

“You helped, Yurio?” Mila coos. “Oh my god, are you a secret romantic? Helping your friends get together?”

“Fuck! Gross. Gross. I hate all of you, I’m not friends with any of you losers—not you, Otabek—”

“We’re definitely friends now,” Yuuri says, absently, not taking his eyes off the ice. Victor’s approaching his last jump. He’s not thinking about the free skate. 

“Fuck you, Katsudon! Take it back. Take it back!” Yurio yells, just as Victor spins into the final position of the program. Executed perfectly. Yuuri is fairly certain he’ll beat JJ. He pats Yurio on the shoe, soothing. 

“It’s too late. You helped me fix things with Victor. We’re definitely friends now.” 

“I’m going to _crush_ you tomorrow,” Yurio mutters. “All of you.”

###

**ISU Grand Prix Final  
Men’s Short Program Results**

**Victor Nikiforov** | 1st | 115.56  
---|---|---  
**Jean-Jacques Leroy** | 2nd | 112.97  
**Yuri Plisetsky** | 3rd | 107.38  
**Otabek Altin** | 4th | 106.65  
**Yuuri Katsuki** | 5th | 97.83  
**Phichit Chulanont** | 6th | 96.73  
  
###

**Barcelona, Spain  
ISU Grand Prix Final  
Saturday, December 10, 2016**

Yuuri wakes the morning of the free skate with Victor draped over him like a weighted blanket.

Victor, it turns out, is both a heavy sleeper and a clingy one; no matter how much Yuuri tosses and turns, he never wakes up, but still somehow manages to drag Yuuri into the orbit of his arms. Apparently Victor has been known to sleep through fire alarms. He’d told a story about it, at dinner last night, and then Chris had told a story about Victor napping through public practice time during Worlds in 2013, which Victor had followed up by reminiscing about the time he’d fallen asleep on a plane on the way to St. Petersburg, missed the call to deplane for a transfer, and ended up in Amsterdam. “I had a good time,” he’d said, laughing. “A four-hour holiday.” 

(There had been a lot of stories at dinner, a lot of them about the banquet in Sochi and its aftermath. Yuuri thinks he now has a pretty good sense of what he got up to that night, and is also certain he never wants to discuss his nude pole-dancing skills in front of Minako or Mari ever again. No drinking for him at this year’s banquet. At least, not champagne.

Afterwards, back in the hotel room, before they got busy with other things, Victor had finally told Yuuri his embarrassing banquet story, and it was—well. Yuuri is _never_ repeating that one.)

Yuuri manages to fish his phone off the bedside table without dislodging Victor’s head and scrolls through his messages. Chris has sent _I was skeptical about you after Tokyo Yuuri, but I’ll admit that you two are cute now. Don’t fuck him up again though or you’ll have me to answer to!!!_

Mari’s text is brief: _I like him. When’s he coming to visit Hasetsu?_

The text chain with Poodle has new additions, too. 

Yuuri hadn’t thought about it, at first—about what it would be like to go back in and pick up their conversation—and there’d no need to text, for a while. Other than when they were skating, Victor had barely let go of his hand after they woke up in the hotel room on Thursday morning. But then, on Friday afternoon, while dragging Yuuri around Barcelona with a boundless enthusiasm Yuuri suspected was meant to distract him from his quad axel nerves, Victor had disappeared into one of the shops on Passeig de Gracia. 

It took Yuuri a moment to notice, too busy gawking up at a strange building that appeared to be roofed in dragon scales and constructed partially from the eye sockets of giants. Then, once he realized that Victor wasn’t standing beside him, he pulled his phone out, reluctant.

He hesitated a long time before typing in _where did you go_ , thinking about how long and wide a gap, how long a story, lay between that and _you don’t know who I am, do you?_

The answer was immediate:

 **Poodle**  
just picking something up Yuuri!!!! ♥️♥️♥️ 2:18 PM  
don’t go anywhere, I’ll be out in a minute 😘 2:18 PM

After that, it was like a wall had come down: they both shot little messages back and forth, slowly pushing the past further and further into the distance, until it was barely visible anymore. 

“Nervous, Yuuri?” Victor murmurs, nosing sleepily against him. He can probably feel the tension in Yuuri’s muscles, or maybe hear his teeth grinding together. “Did you sleep at all last night?”

“A bit,” Yuuri mutters. “I mean, it’s not—I don’t even know why I’m nervous. I don’t care where I place, all season the only thing I’ve cared about is making the Final, so that I could try for the jump. And now it’s here and …” he blows out an irritated burst of air. 

“You’re allowed to care about it,” Victor says. “You’re allowed to want things, Yuuri.” 

“I guess.” 

“Oh! That reminds me!” Victor hops up—Victor, it turns out, can go from fully asleep to bouncingly awake in half a second—and pads naked over to the pile of shopping bags near the door, the fruits of their Friday afternoon shopping spree. He comes back with a small velvet box. A jewellery box. “I got this for you, Yuuri! As a good luck charm? So that you feel like you always have someone with you who believes in you.” 

When Yuuri flips it open, there’s a delicate gold chain inside, with a round charm dangling from it. On the charm is an engraving of a poodle. 

He’s spent so long convinced that no-one believes in him, Yuuri thinks, touching the charm gently. Maybe that’s never been the problem, though. Mari and Minako’s big signs in the audience during the short program, the call from Hasetsu with the triplets and Minami shrieking about the big crowd at the watch party in the onsen—even Yurio, at dinner, had admitted that he thought Yuuri could beat Victor, “if you could just fucking get out of your own head already, Katsudon.” Phichit and Celestino: they didn’t need convincing. 

And Victor, who believed even before he’d ever spoken to Yuuri. 

“Oh,” he says, and snuffles. It’s silly—he doesn’t quite know what he’s crying about—maybe just the surprise of it. “I …”

“Yuuuuuri,” Victor huffs, swiping ineffectually at his tears. “I’ve told you I’m not very good with people crying, right? I never know what to do. Maybe I should just kiss you?” 

“Yeah,” he mutters, rubbing his nose. “That would be good.” 

One things leads to another and it’s a long time before Yuuri can think about anything at all, even the quad axel. Victor’s clever tongue leaves him in a blissed-out, tension-free state. 

“Yuuri,” Victor says, back to lying on top of him. “You know I’ll believe in you, even if you don’t do it? You don’t have to do this for me, alright?”

“I know,” Yuuri says. He pats at the chain, now clasped around his throat. “I know. But for once, I think it might be time to believe in myself.”

###

 **Barcelona, Spain**  
Saturday, December 10, 2016  
ISU Grand Prix Final, Men’s Free Skate

Three-quarters of a second, Yuuri thinks, as he folds his arms into his opening pose. Four and a half rotations. The span of a breath, a blink, a heartbeat. 

When he looks up, Victor is crowded tight against the boards, gaze unwavering. _I’m going to do it, Victor. You’ll watch?_

_I won’t take my eyes off of you._

The music begins. He unfurls, pushes off, and skates towards history.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Stone birch” is a type of birch wood, found in Kamchatka, that is apparently so dense that it sinks in water. Yarumen is a real restaurant in St. Petersburg, in the location described in the _It Figures_ excerpt in the previous chapter; the tapas bar Yuuri and Victor visit in Barcelona is called La Alcoba Azul. 
> 
> Yuuri’s free skate costume is a stripped-down version of what he wears in the show: he was inspired to go with something simple and streamlined by Mirai Nagasu, who apparently cut down the number of rhinestones on her costume in order to make it lighter when she wanted to land the triple axel.


	6. Landing

**Barcelona, Spain  
Saturday, December 10, 2016  
ISU Grand Prix Final, Men’s Free Skate**

_(Live footage of Katsuki Yuuri on the ice at the Centre de Conventions International de Barcelona, performing his free skate. The music is still in the initial pattern of ascending runs on the piano, leading up to a high B chord where a jump would naturally go. As he glides across the ice, the light glints off a gold chain clasped around his neck.)_

**Morooka Hisashi** : _(voiceover)_ … he’s got a triple axel planned to start things off … 

_(Yuuri jumps. Rotates, four-and-a-half times. Lands it: clean.)_

**Mooroka Hisashi** : _(voiceover, excited)_ … that was not a triple axel! That was—that was a quadruple axel! It looks like Katsuki has just landed the first quad axel in international competition—we’ll have to wait to hear about ratification but that looked like enough rotations to me— 

_(The camera catches a tiny fist-pump and a big grin before Yuuri spins off into the next section of the program. In the background of the shot, a silver-haired man in a Team Russia tracksuit is jumping up and down by the side of the boards, clearly screaming in delight.)_

###

Afterwards, Yuuri remembers the jump very clearly: it felt like he was suspended in the air forever, long enough to wonder whether the triplets would post the practice video as soon as the free skate was over, long enough to glance over and pick out faces from the watching crowd—Mari, Minako, Phichit, Celestino, Victor—and to picture the babbling email Minami would send him after he landed it. Long enough to realize that he already knew he was going to land it. 

His memories of almost everything that happened after are like a snowy landscape seen through a frost-touched window: soft, vague. He didn’t really hear his score when it was announced in the Kiss and Cry, and didn’t really see Yurio’s furious breaking of the world record, JJ’s strange implosion, even Victor’s beautiful free skate. All of it felt distant, like something that happened years ago. He had to ask the reporters crowding around him to repeat their questions three times. 

What he _does_ remember from that night, besides the jump itself, is skating right to the boards at the end of his program and kissing Victor so hard they almost fell over. 

“Yuuri,” Victor said, when Yuuri finally pulled back. “That was …”

“Oh,” Yuuri said. Maybe Victor didn’t go in for public declarations. “Was that alright? Sorry, I … ”

“Of course it’s alright, Yuuri. You just surprised me.” 

“Is that good? Do you like surprises?”

“Yuuri. I _love_ surprises. I hope you keep on surprising me forever.”

###

 **FS Newswire** — December 11, 2016 — 

… Nikiforov (RUS) successfully defended his title, beating his rinkmate, Yuri Plisetsky (RUS), by .83 of a point. In winning silver, Plisetsky broke the world record for the free skate with a score of 222.57. The record had long been held by Nikiforov himself. 

“I’m very pleased for [Plisetsky],” Nikiforov said, in an interview after the medal ceremony. “It was a well-deserved score.”

The story of the Final, however, was bronze medallist Yuuri Katsuki (JPN), who stunned onlookers by landing an unannounced quadruple axel during his free skate. The jump was subsequently ratified by the ISU, making Katsuki the first person to land a quadruple axel in international competition. Asked after the ceremony how long he had been preparing to land the jump, Katsuki said he had been working on it for almost a year. He admitted, when pressed, that his injury in March of this year was the result of a fall while attempting the notoriously difficult jump …

###

**Interlude: Tiger**

**Barcelona, Spain  
Sunday, December 11, 2016  
ISU Grand Prix Final Banquet**

“ … a surprise! He didn’t have the fucking decency to tell anyone he was going to do it! It’s so exactly the type of shit that Katsudon would pull.” Yuri hunches into his chair and gives the remains of his dessert—some sort of fried sugar cakes—a vicious poke with his fork. 

“You wouldn’t have kept it secret?” Otabek asks, raising an eyebrow. 

Now that dinner is done, skaters have begun milling around on the dance floor, and Yuri can see that Katsudon is the man of the hour. Wherever he turns, ten people appear and start trying to chat at him. He looks overwhelmed by the attention, probably because he keeps refusing to drink any of the flutes of champagne people keep putting in front of him. Victor, who _is_ happily drinking the champagne, is fending off some of the crowd, but seems more interested in trying to cajole Katsudon into a repeat of last year’s dance-off. 

“Whatever,” Yuri mutters to Otabek. “Maybe I would, maybe I wouldn’t.” He’s not really mad about the secret of it all, although he was pissed off when it became clear that Victor wasn’t surprised to learn that Katsudon could do a quad axel. _Oh yeah I’ve known for ages_ , he’d muttered, smug, when Yuri had accosted him in the back hall before his skate. _He told me a year ago that he was going to try_. Which, whatever, Victor wouldn’t even be _talking_ to Katsudon right now if it wasn’t for Yuri. 

“People know you broke the world record,” Otabek says. Otabek turns out to have an annoying ability to read Yuri’s mind and then respond to his thoughts out loud. 

“They don’t act like it,” he mutters. “And I didn’t beat Victor.” 

“So what? You were fantastic. And there’s always Worlds. The story keeps going.” Otabek drains a flute of champagne and stands up. “Looks like someone wants to talk to you. I’ll, just, uh … go over there.” He points vaguely at an area off the edge of the dance floor and wanders away just as Victor settles into the chair beside Yuri’s.

“What do you want?” Yuri mutters. 

Victor clamps a hand down on his shoulder. “Yuratchka,” he says, softly. 

“Yurio’s fine,” Yuri mutters, turning to look in the other direction. “Don’t get all sentimental on me, okay?” He’s already gotten more than enough disgustingly heartfelt thank you’s from Katsudon to last him for months. 

“Fine. Yurio.” Victor puts a hand on his chin and forces Yuri to turn around to look him in the face. “You’re a fantastic skater, okay? You’re going to be a menace for years. You’re going to give Yuuri all the trouble in the world next season, but that’s fine.”

“What, I’m not going to give _you_ trouble?” On the other side of the ballroom, behind Victor’s back, Yuri can see Christophe Giacometti dragging Katsudon over towards the back wall, where the panoramic windows are bracketed by long white silk curtains. He seems to be gesturing vigorously at the curtains, while Katsudon shakes his head and blushes. Otabek and Chulanont have followed them, Otabek watching with his arms crossed, Chulanont with his phone camera out and recording.

Victor smiles, thinly. “It’ll be hard for you to give me trouble when I’m retired.” 

“What? Now?” Yuri barks. “Don’t you dare, Victor Nikiforov. If you retire before I have another chance to beat you I’ll make you regret it for the rest of your life. God! If it wasn’t for the sex appeal inflation on your fucking short program, I would have beaten you this time.” 

“No, no, don’t worry, Yurio,” Victor says, in the sort of tone he might use with a small, struggling animal. “I’m finishing out the season. You still have Worlds. And European Championships!” 

Now Giacometti has wrapped the end of one dangling curtain around his waist and is attempting to lift himself off the floor, like he thinks he’s in fucking Cirque du Soleil. Katsudon is still shaking his head, but he’s touching one of the other curtains with one hand, and Chulanont is clearly exhorting him to do … something. Whatever it is that he’s about to. 

“Fine. Great. What are you …” Yuri swallows. It’s not that he really _wants_ to know what Victor’s going to do with his life, it’s just that—Well. Fine. So he does want to know, whatever. “What are you doing after?” 

“Worrying about me, Yurio? Don’t. I’ve got plans.” Then he drops the grin, and shifts into his _Serious Victor Gives a Life Lesson_ voice. “Anyway, I just came over here to tell you—don’t neglect your life, okay? Don’t let it just be skating, because there might not be anything left when skating leaves you. I was lucky enough to realize that I needed to make a change before it was too late”—he gestures vaguely behind him, to where Katsudon is now ten feet off the floor, performing some sort of aerial maneuver with the curtain—“but you can’t count on luck.”

“Ugh! Shut up, old man, don’t press your existential crisis on me,” Yuri snaps, and then somehow his arms are wrapping around Victor and pulling him in for a tight hug. He can’t even blame alcohol for this, Yuri thinks, furiously. Maybe there’s just something about the banquet. Something in the air that makes people behave like utter fools. “Hey,” he says, before he can embarrass himself any further. “Did you know your good luck charm is climbing the curtains?”

Victor spins around, takes in the scene—Giacometti has his shirt off, now—and rushes off to rescue Katsudon, or maybe to try to do a half-naked curtain backflip of his own. The two of them _are_ kind of cute, Yuri admits. (Begrudgingly, and only to himself, he’d never say that out loud. He’ll have to be careful not to think it around Otabek.) 

Anyway, he’s still going to wallop both of them at Worlds. But first—he gets up and drops his jacket over the back of the chair—he’s going to go and win this fucking curtain dance-off.

###

> _… in Hasetsu, Japan, his hometown. The summer program is open to up-and-coming skaters under the age of ten. Joining him in the endeavour is his new coach, Victor Nikiforov, who recently retired from competitive skating._
> 
> _While Katsuki gave me a tour of the local landmarks—starting with Hasetsu Castle, which he explained is actually a ninja house—he mused on the idea of legacy and what he wants to do with his newfound influence as a skater._
> 
> _“The quad axel will probably always be the first line in my biography, as a skater,” he said, rubbing absently at the gold charm necklace he was first seen wearing during the Grand Prix Final in Barcelona. “But I don’t want that to be the end of my story. And so that’s where the idea for the summer program came from, I guess. And then Victor said that Hasetsu would be a great place for it and here we are.”_
> 
> _Back at the hot springs inn run by Katsuki’s family, Yu-topia Katsuki, Nikiforov joined us for dinner, and launched into a speech worthy of a tourism ambassador, listing off his favourite things about Hasetsu …_
> 
> _It Figures Magazine_ , May/June 2017 issue, “King of the Quad Axel”

###

**Hasetsu, Kyushu  
August 2017**

The beach is quiet, this time of morning, the bay stretching out in front of Yuuri in a long empty curve. Even Makka, snuffling at the seaweed along the tideline, is quieter than usual, only huffing and shaking the water off when a wave catches his paws. 

Three weeks left, he thinks. Three weeks until they leave for St. Petersburg, and three weeks until he packs up his entire life again and shifts it across the world. Six years ago, when he’d left for Detroit, it had felt like ripping a plant out by the roots and tossing it down on unfamiliar soil. The most recent shift, from Detroit back to Hasetsu, had been easier: at worst had been hectic, filled with goodbyes for Phichit and Celestino and flurries of texts from Victor asking what he needed to bring to Hasetsu. _Yuuri will I need a bathing suit? What about a suit? Should I ship all my competition outfits?_

_Why would we need your competition outfits?_

_I don’t know Yuuri! You never know when they might come in handy!_

He’d brought the competition outfits, and Yuuri had gone through them all one night and found one from Victor’s junior career, black and diamond-spangled, that Yuuri’s thinking of using as his own costume for his short program this year. 

This time, though, it doesn’t feel quite so simple. He understands why they’re going—Victor’s right, St. Petersburg has more resources for an elite skater, and it’s better as a hub for travelling to competitions—and having an apartment of their own will be glorious. (The soundproofing in the onsen is _abysmal_. He’s thankful every day that his parents are so fond of Victor, and there are upsides to living all together … but. Yeah.) He’s not even worried about the Russian, really; he’s been taking lessons with an online tutor, and thinks he can manage day-to-day conversations when Victor isn’t with him. 

And he’ll have Victor. He knows that, now: every time he reaches out, Victor is right there to meet him. 

But knowing it doesn’t stop the nerves. Probably nothing will ever stop the nerves; they’re just a part of who he is, the inevitable tide of worries—will he screw up and plunge in the rankings, embarrass Victor as a coach? Will he fit into Victor’s life? Will the stresses of competition take a toll on their relationship?—still washing over him, even as his confidence grows. 

The only thing he can really do about it is wade in, though. 

His phone buzzes in his pocket, breaking the quiet. Makka barks at an invisible gull and gallops along the frothing edge of the waves.

 **Poodle**  
are you ready Yuuri? 8:22 AM

The gala performances marking the end of the summer program are scheduled for this evening. Victor has been fussing over the details for the last three days, right down to selecting the tie he wants Yuuri to wear. (Apparently Yuuri’s tie choice for the banquet in Barcelona had not been to Victor’s tastes, not that he’d complained during the portion of the evening where Yuuri had been wearing nothing other than the tie.)

He whistles for Makka. “C’mon, Makka, time to go!” 

He can do this. He’s Katsuki Yuuri, the man who landed the fabled quad axel. _Yeah,_ he writes. _I’m ready._

He turns around, and faces the future head-on.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on Twitter [@lanwingji](https://twitter.com/lanwingji) and this fic is retweetable [here](https://twitter.com/lanwingji/status/1355608743866638337)!
> 
> I love comments and would make big happy heart eyes (or Victor's big happy heart-shaped smile) if you felt like leaving one :)


End file.
